Olympic Games

The Olympic Games are the leading international multi-sport competition, held as a Summer Games and a Winter Games on a rolling cycle, with a separate Paralympic Games and Youth Olympic Games. They trace their origins to the athletic festival held at Olympia in ancient ancient Greece and were revived in 1896 under the leadership of Pierre de Coubertin. Today they are organised by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) together with international sports federations, national Olympic committees and host-city organising committees, and they are guided by the Olympic Charter, which sets out the principles of Olympism and the rules of the Olympic Movement. Their scale, broadcast reach and economic weight make them one of the most visible institutions in global sport, and their history intersects with world history, economics, public health and international diplomacy.

This article first traces the Games from their ancient roots at Olympia and their 19th-century revival, then describes the philosophy, symbols and governing structure that define the modern movement. It next examines how the programme of sports is chosen, how host cities are selected, and how athletes participate and are protected from doping. The later sections cover financing, broadcasting and sponsorship, legacy and sustainability, political controversies such as boycotts and the Olympic Truce, cultural representations including art competitions and film, and the continuing debates over eligibility, costs and climate.

Ancient origins at Olympia

Sanctuary, calendar and first Games

The ancient Games were held at Olympia, a sanctuary in the western Peloponnese dedicated to Zeus. By tradition the first Games were held in 776 BC, and they were staged every four years at the sanctuary of Zeus for more than a thousand years. Greek writers later attached myths to the origin, such as the story that Heracles founded the contest in honour of his father. The four-year cycle became the basis of dating: the 776 BC date served the Greeks as a starting point for reckoning time in four-year units called Olympiads. Historians therefore counted years by Olympiads, and this method outlasted the festival itself. The first recorded victor, Coroebus of Elis, won the only event on the early programme, a sprint of one lap of the track, which was called the stadion (roughly 190 metres).

Events and participants

Over the following centuries the programme grew. The Games expanded to include the diaulos, a two-length race similar to the 400-metre race, and the dolichos, a long-distance race. Wrestling, boxing, the pentathlon and chariot racing were added later, and the festival eventually lasted about five days. The pentathlon combined the long jump, discus, javelin, a footrace and wrestling. Victors received a simple wreath cut from wild olive rather than a monetary prize.

Participation was restricted. Competitors had to be free Greek men, and the majority of Olympians were soldiers. Women were excluded from the men's contests and from the spectator area; they had their own festival, the Heraea, held in honour of Hera, in which women runners competed. Married women were barred from attending the men's Games at all.

The Olympic truce

The festival was closely tied to the political life of the Greek world. The Olympic truce, known as the ekecheiria, suspended hostilities among the Greek city-states so that athletes and spectators could travel to Olympia safely. The truce allowed athletes and spectators to travel freely, which helped promote peace among the Greek city-states. Armed conflicts were sometimes timed to avoid the festival, and heralds were sent out in advance to announce the truce. The Games were nonetheless a religious act, combining contests with sacrifices at the altars of the sacred precinct.

Decline and end

The Games were gradually undermined as the Greek world came under Roman control and Christianity spread. The traditional end date is 393 AD, when the Christian emperor Theodosius I banned them, as part of his measures against pagan worship. This date is debated: no surviving law specifically mentions the Olympics, and some historians think the Games continued into the early fifth century. The last datable Olympic festival was held at Antioch in 520, and the games at Olympia itself probably ended in the first half of the fifth century.

Burial and rediscovery

After the festival ceased, the sanctuary was neglected. Fires, earthquakes and floods from the nearby rivers buried the site under thick layers of mud and debris. The ruins were slowly uncovered and systematic excavation began only in the nineteenth century, when German archaeologists began work at the site; the finds there later inspired the modern revival of the Games.

Revival and founding of the modern Games

Pierre de Coubertin, a French educator and historian, put forward the idea of reviving the Games in 1892. His thinking drew on the archaeological work at Olympia and on school sport as he had seen it in Britain and the United States. His first proposal, delivered as a lecture in November 1892, met a cool response from its audience. He kept pushing the idea, and he gained backing from figures such as the British sports administrator Charles Herbert and the American historian William Milligan Sloane.

The decisive step came at a congress held at the Sorbonne in Paris in June 1894. Its agenda had two halves. The first part dealt with amateurism, and the second considered whether the Olympic Games could be re-established. On 23 June the delegates voted to re-establish the Games, to found the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and to hold the first edition in Athens in 1896. Demetrios Vikelas, a Greek writer and businessman living in Paris, was elected the first IOC president. Coubertin wanted the president to come from Greece, the country that would host the first modern Games. Athens had been proposed by Vikelas, and London and Budapest had also been mentioned.

The first modern Games took place in Athens from 6 to 15 April 1896 and were opened by King George I in the Panathenaic Stadium. Fourteen nations took part, according to the IOC's count, and 241 athletes competed in 43 events across nine sports. Most competitors were European, the exception being the United States team, and more than 65 per cent of the athletes were Greek. The marathon, which was contested in international competition for the first time, became the emotional centre of the Games when the local runner Spyridon Louis won it. Women were not permitted to compete.

The early editions that followed were not well defined. Coubertin had proposed holding the 1900 Games alongside the Paris Universal Exposition, and the St. Louis Games of 1904 were likewise tied to a world's fair. Both editions were therefore overshadowed by larger events, and their identity as Olympic Games was weak. The movement's organisation became more stable after the 1912 Stockholm Games, which is generally regarded as a turning point in consolidating the Olympic programme and its structures.

The move of the IOC's seat to Lausanne in Switzerland was a further step in establishing the institution. The First World War interrupted the Olympic cycle, and Coubertin decided to leave Paris for a neutral territory. He had several reasons for choosing Lausanne. The city lay on the shore of Lake Geneva, where he hoped to build a modern Olympia, and it was far from Paris, where he had been widely criticised. He also admired Switzerland, which had reaffirmed its neutrality while the rest of Europe was at war. A formal ceremony was held at the Lausanne town hall on 10 April 1915. The headquarters were first placed at the Casino de Montbenon, and in 1922 the organisation moved into the Villa Mon-Repos, a building the city made available. The decision gave the young institution a secure base from which it could continue its administration during the war.

Olympism and the Olympic Charter

Olympism is the philosophy that Pierre de Coubertin developed to give the modern Games a purpose beyond athletic contest. Coubertin resisted a rigid doctrine. He described Olympism as a spiritual attitude rather than a system of fixed rules, and he framed it around the harmonious connection of body, will and mind, which sport was meant to cultivate. The concept links physical training with culture and education, and it promotes values such as the joy of effort, the educational value of setting a good example, and social responsibility. Coubertin also drew on ancient Greek models of physical and intellectual balance, combined with the English public-school tradition of sport.

The Olympic Charter

The Olympic Charter is the foundational text of the Olympic Movement, and it is where the International Olympic Committee (IOC) formalised Olympism. Its Fundamental Principles of Olympism comprise seven statements. They describe the spirit of the whole movement rather than the rules of any individual sport. Among them are the aim of placing sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, the goal of a peaceful society that respects human dignity, and the assertion that the practice of sport is a human right, a principle that connects the movement to wider human rights debates. Beyond these principles, the Charter sets out the rules for recognising bodies within the movement and the conditions under which the Games are organised. Because it functions as a kind of constitution for the movement, amendments to it are made by the IOC Session.

The motto and its revision

The motto Citius, Altius, Fortius ("Faster, Higher, Stronger") goes back to 1894, when Coubertin adopted a phrase proposed by his friend Henri Didon, a Dominican priest who taught sport near Paris. The motto is in Latin. On 20 July 2021 the IOC Session approved adding the word Communiter ("together") after an en dash, a change that IOC President Thomas Bach had proposed in March 2021. The IOC presented the change as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and as an expression of solidarity. Some Latinists have questioned whether communis or communiter properly conveys the idea of acting together, and have suggested alternative wording. The revision thus shows how the movement reinterprets its founding language in response to contemporary concerns.

The Olympic Movement

The term "Olympic Movement" refers to a network rather than a single organisation. It includes the IOC, the international federations that govern individual sports, the national Olympic committees, athletes, judges and referees, and the organising committees that stage each Games. Each of these bodies has defined responsibilities, and the Charter provides the framework that binds them together. Olympism is the shared philosophy that connects these actors and their activities.

Ideals and debates

The movement's stated ideals of peace, non-discrimination and education have been debated since the beginning. Coubertin initially gave priority to peace, and to social peace in particular, in his vision of the Games. Critics argue that these ideals often conflict with commercial and political realities. A frequently cited example is the IOC's rule limiting protests by athletes during the Games. Critics argue that this restriction runs counter to Coubertin's original emphasis on the moral dimension of sport. Supporters respond that the rule protects the neutrality of the event. This tension between the aspirational language of Olympism and the practical governance of a large global event remains a continuing point of discussion.

Symbols, rituals and ceremonies

The visual and ceremonial vocabulary of the Games was largely set in the early twentieth century, when Pierre de Coubertin and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) began to give the movement a recognisable identity. The five interlocking rings were designed by Coubertin in 1913. They are usually presented as representing the five inhabited continents, Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania, and their colours were chosen so that at least one of them appears on every national flag. The rings sit on a white Olympic flag that was adopted in 1914 and first raised at the Antwerp Games in 1920. The flag is raised and lowered at the opening and closing ceremonies, and it is handed over to the next host city at the close of each Games.

The Olympic flame links the modern Games to ancient Greece. A flame is kindled at the ancient site of Olympia, traditionally by focusing sunlight with a parabolic mirror, in a ceremony staged by Greek authorities. The flame is then carried to the host city by a torch relay. This practice was introduced for the 1936 Berlin Games, when the relay ran through several countries before reaching the stadium. The relay has since become one of the most visible parts of the Games' public life, and host organisers design its routes, runners and cultural themes to showcase their own country and region. Torchbearers are often chosen to represent local communities, which turns the relay into a travelling celebration in towns that will never host an event.

Opening and closing ceremonies combine several fixed elements. Athletes enter the stadium by delegation, traditionally with Greece leading the procession and the host nation coming last, while the others follow the alphabetical order of the host language. Each ceremony includes cultural performances designed by the host organisers, and the official declaration that opens the Games is made by the head of state of the host country. At the opening ceremony, an athlete takes the athletes' oath on behalf of all competitors, a practice first used at the 1920 Antwerp Games, and officials take a separate oath as judges and referees. The Olympic flame is lit in the stadium at the opening ceremony and extinguished at the closing ceremony, when the Games are formally brought to an end. Within these ceremonies, the Olympic anthem, composed by Spyridon Samaras to words by Kostis Palamas and adopted by the IOC in 1958, is performed during the flag ceremonies.

Medal ceremonies follow a more compact and repeated pattern. Winners stand on a podium, receive their medals from IOC or federation officials, and the national anthem of the gold medallist's country is played while the flag of that country is raised. Because these rituals are standard across sports, they give each Games a shared structure that spectators from different countries can recognise, even when the performances, languages and music differ.

Host cities design their own emblems, mascots and ceremonial programmes, but these must be approved within the framework of the Olympic Charter and the IOC's brand guidelines. The Paris 2024 mascots, the Phryges, and the Milano Cortina 2026 mascots, Tina and Milo, are examples of how local organisers adapt the shared visual system to their own cultural identity while keeping the rings, the flag and the core ceremonial order intact. The result is a balance between a fixed international grammar of symbols and room for each host to tell its own story.

Organisational structure

The IOC and its three organs

The International Olympic Committee is a non-governmental body. Its headquarters are in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the president's office is seated there as well (Seat: IOC Headquarters, Lausanne, Switzerland). The Olympic Charter divides the IOC's powers among three organs: the Session, the Executive Board and the president (The powers of the IOC are exercised by its organs).

The Session is the general assembly of IOC members and the body's highest authority, and its decisions are final (). It normally meets once a year, but an extraordinary meeting can be convened by the president or at the written request of at least a third of the members (). Votes at the Session settle membership, the election of the president and board members, and changes to the Charter ().

The Executive Board and its composition

Day-to-day administration falls to the Executive Board, which also prepares proposals for the Session (). The body began in 1921 under the name Executive Committee and was renamed in 1955 (; ). It consists of the president, four vice-presidents and ten other members. According to the IOC's own website, these members are chosen by secret ballot for four-year terms (). Every board member is elected by the Session by majority vote (). Standing commissions, which prepare work on areas such as athletes' affairs and ethics, support both the board and the Session.

The president and the 2025 election

The president chairs the Executive Board and carries overall responsibility for running the IOC (). The office is filled by secret ballot of the Session and carries an eight-year term that can be renewed once for four years (). Thomas Bach's tenure lasted twelve years, the maximum allowed under this rule ().

On 20 March 2025, the Session met in Costa Navarino, Greece, and elected Kirsty Coventry of Zimbabwe. She won a majority of 49 of the 97 votes in the first and only round (). She became the first woman to hold the presidency, and the first African to do so (). She has held office since 23 June 2025 ().

Federations, national committees and organising committees

Outside the IOC, the structure is layered. International federations govern individual sports, set their technical rules and propose the sports to be included in the Games. National Olympic committees select athletes and run national teams. For each Games, an organising committee is set up by the host city together with the relevant national Olympic committee. It is responsible for operations, venues and staging.

The Olympic Agenda reforms

The Olympic Agenda reform programme, launched under Bach, was unanimously approved by the 127th Session in Monaco in December 2014 (). Its successor, Olympic Agenda 2020+5, was approved unanimously at the 137th Session in March 2021, comprising 15 recommendations (). It set the strategic direction to 2025 (). The IOC describes the reforms as having reshaped the IOC, the Games and the wider Movement (). The reforms also covered how Games are delivered and how hosts are selected; the host-selection process is discussed in more detail in a later section.

Summer, Winter and Youth Games

For most of the modern movement's history, the summer and winter editions shared a calendar year. The tradition of holding the Winter Olympics in the same year as the Summer Olympics continued until 1992. Since then, the winter edition has fallen in the second year after each summer edition, so the two cycles are offset by two years and one of the two Games takes place in most years.

The first winter event was not originally called the Olympic Winter Games. The French Olympic Committee ran a twelve-day programme of winter sport at Chamonix in January and February 1924. Some 258 athletes from 16 national teams travelled to Chamonix to compete in 16 events across nine disciplines. The IOC had only lent its patronage to the event, which was known as an "International Winter Sports Week". Chamonix 1924 was retrospectively acknowledged as the first Olympic Winter Games at the 24th IOC Session in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1926. Olympedia notes that the IOC's 1925 amendment to its charter, which began a cycle of Winter Games, did not name Chamonix, and it attributes that omission to a clerical error in the minutes. The IOC has long since recognized the 1924 Chamonix events as the 1st Olympic Winter Games.

The Youth Olympic Games were created as a separate event for young competitors. They are an elite sporting event for young people from all over the world aged up to 17 at the time of the Games. The first Summer edition was held in Singapore in 2010, and the first Winter edition followed in Innsbruck in 2012. The fourth Summer edition is scheduled for Dakar, Senegal, from 31 October – 13 November 2026, and this is the first time the Youth Olympic Games will be organised in Africa. Out of the 153 events across all sports on the programme, there are 73 for each gender and seven mixed events. The Games have not yet opened at the time of writing, so their results are not part of this entry.

The most recent Winter Games were the Milano Cortina 2026 Games, which ran from 6 to 22 February 2026. The event featured 92 nations (including AIN), 2,884 athletes, and 116 events in 8 sports (16 disciplines). The programme included the debut of ski mountaineering. The Games were spread across northern Italy, and two Olympic cauldrons were extinguished simultaneously in two different cities — Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, which was a first for the Winter Games. The Paralympic Winter Games followed, with the Milan Cortina Paralympics' opening ceremony also taking place in the Verona Arena, on March 6, and the Games running until March 15. At the closing ceremony, the Olympic flag was handed to the mayors of the next Winter host, the French Alps.

The next Summer Games are scheduled for Los Angeles in 2028.

Paralympic Games

The Paralympic Games grew out of a hospital rehabilitation programme. In 1944 the British government asked Dr Ludwig Guttmann to open a spinal injuries centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, and exercise therapy for patients gradually became recreational and then competitive sport. On 29 July 1948, the opening day of the London Olympics, Guttmann staged a contest for wheelchair athletes, which he called the Stoke Mandeville Games. Sixteen injured servicemen and women took part, all in archery. Dutch ex-servicemen joined in 1952, which made the event international, and the competition kept expanding in the following years.

The 1960 edition in Rome is regarded as the first Paralympic Games. It was held from 18 to 25 September, six days after the Olympic closing ceremony, and used the Olympic venues. About 400 athletes from 23 countries competed in eight sports. The event was retrospectively designated as the Paralympics, a name the IOC did not formally approve until 1984. The Games did not return to the Olympic host city until Seoul in 1988 for the Summer edition and Albertville in 1992 for the Winter edition, although the two sets of Games were always held in the same year.

The relationship between the two movements was formalised in 2001. The IOC and the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), which is a separate body with its own governance, signed an agreement that established the principle of "one bid, one city". Under it, a city bidding for the Olympics also takes on the obligation to stage the Paralympics, using the same venues and infrastructure. The agreement was later extended, and a further long-term partnership was signed to run until at least 2032. Joint planning and marketing aim to give Paralympic organisers the same integrated organising committees, funding and detailed preparation that the Olympics receive, although relations between the two bodies have at times been strained by disputes such as those over Russian participation.

Paralympic sport is organised around classification, a system that determines eligibility and then groups athletes so that competition depends on skill rather than impairment alone. Athletes must have an impairment from a defined list of ten eligible impairments, including impaired muscle power, limb deficiency, short stature, uncoordinated or involuntary movement, vision impairment and intellectual impairment. Because different sports demand different abilities, classification is sport-specific. An arm impairment, for example, affects swimming more than running. Within athletics, the classes are coded by event type and impairment: T/F11–13 for vision impairment, T/F20 for intellectual impairment, T/F40–41 for short stature and T/F42–44 for lower-limb impairments. Some classes contain athletes with different impairments who have a similar level of activity limitation, so a class does not always correspond to a single diagnosis.

Classification remains technically demanding. The IPC has promoted evidence-based research that correlates measures of impairment with sport-specific performance before forming classes, and it has encouraged the move away from a single structure. Vision-impaired sports, however, have long used the same three classes regardless of the sport, and the IPC and the International Blind Sports Federation have published guidance on developing sport-specific criteria for them. Classification also relates to the wider "Paralympic family". The International Sports Organisation for the Disabled was created in the 1960s to offer competition to athletes such as those with vision impairment, amputees, people with cerebral palsy and paraplegic athletes who could not take part in the Stoke Mandeville Games. The Paralympic programme has expanded accordingly, with the Winter Games held in Salt Lake City in 2002, for example, drawing 416 athletes from 36 countries.

Sports programme, competition rules and measurement

The Olympic programme is made up of sports and events. An event is a competition within a sport that produces a ranking and awards medals and diplomas. The choice of sports, and the criteria for including them, rest with the IOC Session, which must decide on a sport's inclusion no later than the session that elects the host city for that edition. After each Games the IOC reviews the programme. The number of sports is constrained by practical limits: the IOC has guided that the Summer Games should cap at about 10,500 athletes within a 19-day schedule, and the Brisbane 2032 organisers have been asked to stay near that figure, while Los Angeles 2028 could reach about 13,000 participants.

Since Olympic Agenda 2020, the organising committee of each Games can propose additional sports or disciplines for its own edition, a change that was first used for Paris 2024, whose organisers proposed breaking, sport climbing, skateboarding and surfing. Organising committees can add sports but cannot remove them. The methodology approved for Brisbane 2032 onwards sets a limit of four additional disciplines for the Summer Games and two for the Winter Games, and it applies a three-stage evaluation: an initial screening of governance, integrity, anti-doping compliance and athlete safeguarding, followed by an assessment of global appeal, cost and operational complexity, and athlete representation. Only sports that adopt the World Anti-Doping Code and have a recognised international federation can enter the programme. Earlier IOC evaluation criteria were grouped into 35 measures across five categories: the Olympic proposal itself (format, number of athletes and officials, venues), value added to the movement (legacy, youth interest), institutional matters, popularity, and business model.

Inclusion does not guarantee a permanent place. Baseball and softball, for example, were dropped after Beijing 2008 and returned at Tokyo 2020, which was held in 2021. Skateboarding, sport climbing, surfing and karate made their debuts at that same Tokyo edition, while breaking was added for Paris 2024. Some sports have been dropped and later reinstated, as with golf, rugby and cricket.

For the 2028 Los Angeles Games, the IOC Session in Mumbai in October 2023 approved five sports as a single package: baseball/softball, cricket (T20), flag football, lacrosse (sixes) and squash, with only two votes against. Squash and flag football were making their Olympic debuts, while cricket had last been contested at Paris 1900. The IOC later set the cricket format at six teams in each of the men's and women's tournaments, with 90 athlete quotas per gender and squads of 15 players. Other proposals, including karate, kickboxing, motorsports and breaking, were not part of the Los Angeles programme.

Results in the Olympic programme depend on precise measurement. Electronic timing, typically recorded to the thousandth of a second in sprinting and other timed events, is supplemented by photo-finish cameras for close finishes and by officiating technology for judging, scoring and rule decisions. The reliability of these systems relies on standards of time and length defined through the international measurement system and on routine calibration, which is why timing and distance are treated as technical disciplines in their own right rather than simple readings.

Competition rules have a layered structure. Each international federation writes the technical rules for its sport, including scoring, equipment and eligibility details, but those rules must conform to the Olympic Charter and to the Games' own requirements for organisation and conduct. Disputes can therefore involve both a federation's technical rulebook and the overarching principles of the Charter, and the IOC and the relevant federation may have different roles in resolving them.

Host city selection and bidding

Choosing a host is a multi-year process run by the IOC, not a single contest decided by one bid file. It usually begins with informal talks between the IOC, a city or region, and its National Olympic Committee. If those talks go well, the candidate can enter a non-committal "Continuous Dialogue" and becomes known as an Interested Party. At this stage the IOC gives technical help and runs feasibility studies, and the candidate is not required to make financial commitments or submit a formal file. Two Future Host Commissions, one for the Summer Games and one for the Winter Games, are made up of IOC members and other movement stakeholders. They advise the Executive Board, which decides whether a project moves forward.

The current model came from Olympic Agenda 2020, which the IOC approved in December 2014. It replaced the older competitive bid format, in which many cities prepared expensive full applications, with a process built on dialogue, lower costs and flexibility. The dialogue approach was formally introduced in 2019. The Olympic Charter was also amended so that the election no longer has to take place a fixed seven years before the Games, and so that a host may be several cities, regions or countries rather than one. Using this flexibility, the Executive Board proposed in 2017 to award the 2024 and 2028 Games at the same time, which led to Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028.

Brisbane is the clearest example of the new approach. The Future Host Commission nominated it as preferred candidate on 24 February 2021, and the IOC Session confirmed it on 21 July 2021 at the 138th Session in Tokyo, by 72 votes to 5, with 3 abstentions. The award came 11 years in advance, the longest lead time in Olympic history. The process also drew criticism. Members of the German bid called the changed rules hard to follow and lacking transparency, and the 2021 outcome, in which Brisbane became the sole candidate, left other hopeful cities with little warning.

The selection for 2036 follows the same logic, with some refinements. In October 2026 the IOC published a handbook setting out the full pathway. Seven National Olympic Committees are currently Interested Parties: Germany, Hungary, India, Qatar, the Republic of Korea, South Africa and Türkiye. No new parties will be considered after 31 October 2026. The Interested Parties are to present their projects to the Future Host Commission in November 2026. In March 2027 the Executive Board is due to move selected projects into a Strategic Dialogue, which is a more detailed stage that requires responses to a formal questionnaire and legal and financial guarantees. The Board then plans to open a Targeted Dialogue with Preferred Hosts in December 2028, and IOC members are expected to vote in mid-2029.

Projects are assessed on several technical and strategic factors, including the venue masterplan and athlete experience, the funding strategy, political and public support, the capacity to deliver the Games, and a legacy strategy for host communities. Unlike the recent single-candidate pattern, more than one project may remain in the late phase, which would allow a contested vote at the 2029 Session. Whether this change will reduce the criticism of earlier rounds remains to be seen.

Athletes, eligibility and participation

The rules on who may compete have changed considerably since the Games were revived. The early modern movement rested on a strict amateur ideal that excluded anyone who earned money from sport. Over the late twentieth century that barrier was dismantled, and open eligibility now lets professional athletes take part in most sports.

Women were absent from the first modern Games in Athens in 1896, when Pierre de Coubertin described their inclusion as impractical and aesthetically unsuitable. The first modern Olympic Games to feature female athletes was the 1900 Games in Paris. Hélène de Pourtalès of Switzerland became the first woman to compete at the Olympic Games. Out of a total of 997 athletes, 22 were women. Their events were limited to a narrow set of disciplines: lawn tennis, golf, sailing, croquet and equestrian competition. De Pourtalès later became the first female Olympic champion as a member of a winning sailing crew, and Briton Charlotte Cooper became the first female individual champion by winning the women's singles tennis competition. Participation grew steadily afterwards. The 2024 Paris Olympics were the first to have the goal of achieving gender parity between men and women. For the first time ever, all 206 National Olympic Committees had at least one female and one male athlete in their Olympic teams.

The Olympic Charter provides for athlete representation through the IOC Athletes' Commission, which was created in 1981. Its origins lie in a written decision by Juan Antonio Samaranch, who announced a commission that would speak for athletes before the IOC. At the Olympic Games Seoul 1988, the Athletes' Commission took on its highest-profile role since its inception. It held a meeting with 100 athletes from 38 different countries, and manned an office in the Olympic Village on a daily basis. Its mission is to represent athletes within the Olympic Movement and to support them in both sporting and non-sporting careers. The Commission is composed of a maximum of 23 members, 12 of whom are directly chosen through elections during the Olympic Summer and Winter Games, with a maximum of 11 appointed members to ensure a balance between genders, regions and sports. Its chair sits on the IOC Executive Board on behalf of athletes, and the commission also maintains a network of athlete commissions across the National Olympic Committees, international federations and organising committees.

In June 2026 the IOC announced the Fit for the Future Olympian Grant. Under this programme, every athlete at the Olympic Games will be eligible for a USD 10,000 grant to support their sports career or career transition. The scheme is financed by a fund of USD 140 million per Olympiad, and about 14,000 Olympians per Olympiad are expected to be eligible. Payments are routed through existing national structures: the grant will be delivered through existing National Olympic Committee (NOC) structures. Any allocation an athlete does not claim stays in the fund for future Olympians. The first beneficiaries are the athletes of Milano Cortina 2026, with applications expected to open at the end of 2026 and first payments in 2027. Eligibility is conditional: All Olympians are eligible if they have not committed an anti-doping rule violation or violated the IOC's code of ethics, conditions of participation or the Olympic Charter. The IOC presents the payment as recognition of the path to the Games rather than prize money, and it is intended to complement existing support programmes rather than replace them.

Eligibility for individual Games is shaped by several layers of rules. International federations set qualification standards for their sports, and the IOC sets the overarching conditions of participation. Questions such as changes of nationality and the qualification route of an athlete are therefore decided case by case under the rules in force for each edition, which means that an athlete's right to compete can depend on both the federation's criteria and the IOC's framework.

Anti-doping and integrity

The modern anti-doping framework dates from a 1999 conference convened in Lausanne by the IOC, whose declaration called for an independent international body. The conference produced the Lausanne Declaration, which provided for an independent international anti-doping agency to be operational for the Sydney 2000 Games. That body, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), came into being on 10 November 1999, with protecting athletes and preserving clean sport as its stated goals. It is made up of equal representatives from the Olympic Movement and public authorities. Its central instrument is the World Anti-Doping Code, which aligns rules across sports and countries. More than 650 sports organisations, including the IOC and the International Paralympic Committee, have adopted the Code, so Olympic athletes are bound by it. The prohibited list is updated every year. Revisions are based on scientific input and consultation throughout the Olympic movement.

Testing at the Games is run by the International Testing Agency (ITA). The ITA has taken over responsibility for doping control at the Games from the IOC since 2019. Scale has grown considerably. For Paris 2024, about 4,770 controls were carried out on 4,150 athletes, roughly 39 per cent of all participants, and nearly 90% of all participating athletes were tested at least once before the start of the Games. At Tokyo 2020, WADA reported 10 "adverse analytical findings", six of which were found to be violations, out of a total of 6,200 tests covering over 4,200 athletes. The ITA also collects and stores blood samples for the athlete biological passport, a system that monitors specific physiologic parameters over time to detect abnormal changes that may suggest doping.

Samples are kept after the event, and retesting can change results years later. When samples from the London 2012 Olympics were re-examined in June 2020, more than 80 anti-doping rule violations that had gone undetected were identified, and the ITA prosecuted these cases, which led to medals being reassigned. Sanctions have included disqualification, the withdrawal and reallocation of medals, athlete suspensions and, in exceptional cases, the suspension of an entire national team. The most prominent case involves Russia. An independent investigation published in 2016 (the McLaren Report) documented a state-supported doping system linked to the 2014 Sochi Games, and Russian athletes have since competed under neutral designations at several Games.

The suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) has a different origin. It had been in effect since October 2023, following the invasion of Ukraine and the ROC's decision to take in four partially occupied Ukrainian regions under its jurisdiction. On 7 July 2026, the IOC Executive Board provisionally lifted the suspension, giving Russian athletes a chance to compete and qualify for the 2028 Summer Olympics. The IOC said the ROC no longer includes as its members any regional sports organisations in territories under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian NOC. Returning Russian athletes must meet strict anti-doping requirements, including testing by the International Testing Agency. Whether they may use the national flag, colours or anthem has not been decided. Athlete groups Global Athlete and FairSport criticised the move, arguing that it weakened Olympic principles given the ongoing war and Russia's history of doping. IOC President Kirsty Coventry has argued that athletes should have the chance to compete and should not be held responsible for their governments' actions.

Match-fixing, corruption and manipulation of results fall under separate integrity mechanisms, including the IOC's integrity framework and the ethics commissions of the wider Olympic Movement. Reinstatement decisions for suspended bodies therefore remain a governance question, because they weigh the protection of individual athletes against the record of the national committee concerned.

Financing, broadcasting and sponsorship

The IOC owns no stadiums and employs no athletes, so its income comes mainly from selling rights. Broadcast rights sales make up the largest share of IOC revenue each four-year cycle. Sponsorship through the TOP programme is the next largest source, with ticketing-type income, licensing and hospitality mostly collected by host organisers. The IOC then passes most of this money on. It keeps less than 10 per cent of the revenue it generates, and the rest goes to national Olympic committees, international federations and organising committees. Economic analysts often describe this as a model in which the IOC's income is large and stable, while host organisers carry the operating risk.

Broadcast income is the most valuable line. For the 2021–2024 cycle, which covered Tokyo 2020, Beijing 2022 and Paris 2024, the IOC generated roughly 4.6 billion dollars from selling media rights to networks and streaming platforms worldwide. Figures from the IOC's published accounts are not always presented in the same way. One breakdown lists television rights at $3.25 billion for the same cycle, so the totals depend on which categories are counted. Rights are sold on a territorial basis, and the Americas have historically been the largest market. In one earlier cycle, $1.6 billion was recouped from the Americas, $842.5 million from Asia, $606 million from Europe, $77.6 million from Oceania, and $17.4 million from Africa. The production of the international feed is handled centrally by the Olympic Broadcasting Services, so that individual broadcasters receive a common signal and can then add their own commentary and coverage.

The TOP programme was created to diversify the IOC's revenue. The IOC created the TOP Programme in 1985 in order to develop a diversified revenue base for the Olympic Games and to establish long-term corporate partnerships. Each partner receives exclusive global marketing rights and opportunities within a designated product or service category. The programme supports the IOC, the national committees and the organising committees alike. Its revenue has fluctuated sharply. It grew strongly through the 2010s, but in 2025 it fell after several major companies left. The sponsorship programme generated $560 million in 2025, down from $871.5 million in 2024, and the IOC is now working to rebuild its portfolio with 11 partners.

Host cities occupy a different position. They keep the ticket sales, local sponsorship and hospitality income that they generate, but they also absorb most construction and security costs. The IOC does contribute a share of its broadcast and TOP revenue to each host, yet the allocation still leaves most of the financial risk with the city. The IOC pays for some operational costs, like the Games' broadcasting, but the host city is on the hook for pretty much everything else - the stadiums, the Olympic Village, security. Under the arrangements described by analysts, any cost overruns are the city's responsibility. Researchers who study major projects have reported that there's not one instance of an Olympics that were delivered to budgets.

The economic benefits of hosting are therefore disputed. The IOC and its supporters argue that hosting can raise a city's global profile and generate economic benefits through tourism and investments in infrastructure. Critics point to the record of cost overruns. Montreal in 1976 is the standard example: the projected cost of $124 million was billions below the actual cost, largely due to construction delays and cost overruns for a new stadium, saddling the city's taxpayers with some $1.5 billion in debt that took nearly three decades to pay off. Los Angeles in 1984 is the usual counterexample. It was the only city to bid, and it was able to rely almost entirely on existing stadiums and infrastructure rather than promise lavish new facilities to entice the IOC. Combined with higher broadcast revenue, this produced a $215 million operating surplus. The Olympic Charter sets the framework within which these commercial arrangements operate, including the protection of the Olympic symbols and limits on intellectual property misuse such as ambush marketing.

Hosting, legacy and sustainability

The afterlife of Olympic venues has been uneven, and Athens 2004 is the case most often cited as a warning. Eight of the Athens venues have fared poorly, most notably the five at the Hellinikon complex on the former airport site, which have stayed unused apart from occasional use of one fencing hall. Other sites followed a similar path: the Faliro beach volleyball venue, the Nikaia weightlifting hall and the Goudi complex have seen little or no lasting use. Greece's finance ministry put the Games' cost at 8.5 billion euros, while the beach volleyball venue has been used sparingly for two decades.

Not every site was abandoned. The athletes' village was converted into housing for workers, and at Elliniko, stadiums and training facilities that had stood idle for years were demolished to clear land for a private residential, casino and park scheme. Spyros Capralos, head of the Hellenic Olympic Committee, concluded that hosts should not build permanent facilities that would serve no purpose afterwards. Critics of the Greek case argue that the real failure lay less in construction than in the absence of a funded plan for what came next.

The IOC's Sustainability Strategy, launched in 2017, responds to these problems. It is organised around five focus areas, including infrastructure and natural sites, mobility and climate, and it aligns with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Its 2030 intentions give priority to existing infrastructure, favour temporary or demountable venues where no lasting legacy need exists, and require any permanent building to have a minimal environmental footprint. Its strategic intents for 2030 include maximising the use of existing infrastructure and using temporary and demountable venues where no long-term legacy need exists or can be justified.

Paris 2024 was the first Games designed fully under Olympic Agenda 2020. Around 95 per cent of its venues were existing or temporary, and the organisers targeted a carbon footprint 50 per cent lower than the London 2012 and Rio 2016 average, counting all emissions, including spectator travel. The estimated footprint of about 1.5 million tonnes, compared with roughly 3.3 million for London 2012, was presented as the test of that approach.

Milano Cortina 2026 extended the model geographically. Its venues were spread across several clusters in northern Italy rather than concentrated in one city. The organisers argued that this multi-venue arrangement would make hosting more sustainable by using a region's existing infrastructure, rather than requiring one city to build costly structures that would be used once and then left to decline. The IOC's final report on the Games states that 85 per cent of competition venues were existing or temporary, and the Games were expected to generate more than EUR 5 billion in economic impact for Italy. The dispersed format has trade-offs: travel between towns could take several hours by car, especially on remote winter roads.

Urban legacy is central to most host plans. Milan's Olympic village, for example, is slated to become a student neighbourhood with affordable housing, cafés, public space and community facilities after the Games. Such projects bring transport, housing and public-space investment to a city, but they can also raise concerns about displacement, rising land values and cost overruns, particularly when public money is involved.

For the Winter Games, snow reliability and the environmental effects of venues are the most pressing questions. The IOC has stated that the host regions chosen for the next three Winter editions are assessed as climate reliable beyond the middle of the century. Researchers writing in 2026, however, argue that the Games should be scaled down to fit existing venues and transport systems in order to reduce their footprint, and they note that international spectator travel still accounted for nearly half of the total carbon footprint. Planners therefore increasingly treat reuse of existing facilities as a condition of hosting rather than an optional measure.

Politics, boycotts and the Olympic Truce

Political messages have appeared at the Games almost from the start of the modern movement, even though the rules of the movement restrict demonstrations at venues. The 1936 Games in Berlin were organised by Nazi Germany as a showcase for the regime. The American athlete Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals, drew wide attention and was seen by many observers as contradicting the regime's racial ideology.

The 1968 Mexico City Games produced the most famous protest on the podium. On October 16, 1968, after finishing first and third respectively in the 200-meter dash, Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood on the medal podium in black socks and raised their black-gloved fists. Smith's gesture symbolised Black pride and Carlos's represented unity among Black Americans, while the shoeless socks referred to poverty. Australian silver medallist Peter Norman wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights pin in support of the protest. The reaction was severe. The International Olympic Committee threatened to expel the U.S. team unless the two athletes were sent home, and the U.S. Olympic Committee complied. In 1972, at the Munich Games, members of the Palestinian militant group Black September took Israeli athletes and coaches hostage and killed eleven of them, an event that remains a central reference in the history of Olympic security.

Boycotts became a direct instrument of Cold War politics. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the United States led a boycott, with President Carter urging other nations to withdraw their participation unless the Soviets withdrew their military presence. Carter announced the American decision on 21 March 1980. Only eighty-one nations participated in Moscow, although more world records were set there than at the 1976 Games in Montreal. The Soviet Union answered in 1984. The Soviet Union and 13 Eastern Bloc countries boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics, citing concerns about athlete safety and tensions with the United States. Moscow officially pointed to security concerns, but it was widely speculated that the move was a tit-for-tat response to the U.S. boycott four years earlier. The absence of many Eastern Bloc athletes consequently weakened the fields across many sports. Sources differ on the exact number of countries involved, as the count depends on whether the Soviet Union and its allies are all included.

The Olympic Truce, or ancient Greek ekecheiria, was a short suspension of hostilities that allowed athletes and spectators to travel to the festival. In 1992, the International Olympic Committee renewed this tradition by calling upon all nations to observe the Truce. The United Nations General Assembly followed with resolution 48/11 in 1993, which urged Member States to observe the Olympic Truce from the seventh day before the opening to the seventh day following the closing of each Olympic Games. Since then the General Assembly has adopted, every two years – one year before each edition of the Olympic Games – a resolution entitled "Building a peaceful and better world through sport and the Olympic ideal". The resolution for Milano Cortina 2026 was adopted on 19 November 2025 by the 80th Session of the UNGA in New York. 165 UN Member States co-sponsored the resolution.

These resolutions are appeals to Member States rather than enforcement mechanisms. Their effect on conflicts outside the Games has been limited, and the record of the boycotts and protests above shows that the Games have continued to be shaped by the political tensions of their time.

Culture, art and media

For nearly four decades the Olympic programme also included art contests. Between 1912 and 1948, entries in architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture were judged by juries and awarded gold, silver and bronze medals, alongside athletic events. Art entries had to draw on sport as their subject, and each work had to be original and unpublished. The official competitions ended after 1948 because of disputes over amateurism, and from 1952 a non-competitive art and cultural festival has accompanied each Games. Some sources list 1952 as a further art-contest edition, but it had no official Olympic status.

The contests produced some unusual cases. At Stockholm in 1912, American sculptor and sport shooter Walter Winans won gold for a bronze statuette, <i>An American Trotter</i>, and was one of only two people to win medals in both art and sport. Pierre de Coubertin, the movement's founder, submitted an ode under a pseudonym and won the literature gold in the same year. The contests reflected Coubertin's belief that the arts were necessary to recover the full spirit of the ancient Games, which he saw as a reason to keep them within the movement.

Film has been the most enduring cultural record of the Games. Leni Riefenstahl's <i>Olympia</i>, a 1938 German documentary in two parts, covers the Berlin 1936 Games held under the Nazi government. It is regarded as the first documentary feature film of an Olympic Games. It used advanced techniques such as unusual camera angles, rapid cuts and tracking rails set into the stands, and it remains on many lists of the greatest films, even though it is widely described as Nazi propaganda. Its methods later influenced how sports events were filmed for television, which had begun with limited transmissions of the Berlin Games. Over the following decades, satellite and digital broadcasting expanded audiences far beyond the stadium, changing how the Games are watched and how their images are produced, distributed and archived. Related issues are covered in film and photography.

The IOC's historical material is kept in the Olympic Museum in Lausanne and in the IOC's archives. These collections contain documents, posters, sculpture, photographs and other objects that track the history of the Games and the design work associated with them, and they serve as a resource for historians and artists alike.

The Olympic brand has also moved into digital media, and the IOC's approach to new technology has become part of this agenda. On 28 September 2026, the IOC published its first Trustworthy AI Framework for the Olympic Movement, although other outlets date the launch to 29 September. The framework sets out seven principles, covering safeguarding, data protection, reliability, transparency, accountability, fairness and sustainability, and comes with a self-assessment checklist to help organisations evaluate risks. It was developed with the consulting firm Deloitte and drew on input from more than 200 leaders across the movement. The document describes itself as practical guidance rather than binding rules. Its stated concern is that AI is used to serve athletes and sport, which is why it stresses the protection of athlete data, a concern that grows as wearables and performance-monitoring systems collect more information. The framework is relevant to artificial intelligence and data privacy in sport.

Ongoing debates and future challenges

Eligibility for the women's category is among the most contested questions facing the movement. Until 2026 the IOC largely left transgender participation to each international federation, and its 2021 guidance asked federations to draft their own rules. On 26 March 2026 the IOC replaced that patchwork with a single policy. Under it, eligibility for any female-category event at the Olympic Games or other IOC events is limited to biological females, determined by a one-time SRY gene screen, and the rule applies from the 2028 Los Angeles Games. The IOC says the policy is not retroactive and does not cover grassroots or recreational sport. It presents the rule as a protection of the female category grounded in medical expertise. Human rights organisations have opposed sex testing and genetic screening as eligibility tools, and scientific findings on whether transgender women retain an advantage after hormone treatment remain mixed, so the debate is unlikely to close soon.

Cost, host selection and public support

Hosting the Games has become harder to justify to many cities and voters. Rising budgets, the cost of new venues and the difficulty of securing public backing have pushed the IOC to revise how hosts are chosen and how Games are budgeted. The 2036 process shows the direction of these reforms. In early October 2026 the IOC published a handbook for the selection process and named seven National Olympic Committees in continuous dialogue: Germany, Hungary, India, Qatar, the Republic of Korea, South Africa and Türkiye. No other parties will be considered after 31 October 2026. The IOC has described this as a change from earlier practice, in which a single candidate was sometimes named early without any competitive stage. Interested parties are due to present their projects in November 2026, and feasibility assessments are scheduled for completion by March 2027. Projects are to be judged on venue masterplans, funding strategy, political and public support, delivery capability and legacy plans. The Strategic Dialogue stage is intended to narrow the field, and the IOC expects the host to be elected by its members in mid-2029.

Climate and sustainability

Climate change poses a particular problem for the Winter Games, which depend on reliable snow and cold. Many venues sit in mountain areas where seasons are shortening, and the cost of artificial snow raises both financial and environmental questions. The IOC has therefore made sustainability a core priority, emphasising the reuse of existing venues, limits on new construction and lower carbon emissions. The Milano Cortina 2026 Games, which were spread across several regions, illustrate one response, but whether dispersed hosting can be repeated in other winter locations is still uncertain. The same logic applies to Summer Games: the IOC's aim of reducing new building now competes with the expectations of host governments that want new facilities to showcase their development plans. Questions of sustainable development and climate change are therefore likely to shape future host choices.

Trust, integrity and governance

Public confidence in Olympic governance has been tested repeatedly. Doping scandals, including the high-profile cases involving Russian athletes after the 2014 Sochi Games, have raised doubts about enforcement and about how consistently sanctions are applied. Corruption allegations in past bidding contests have made the selection of hosts a matter of public scrutiny, and critics have questioned how transparent decision-making is within the IOC. Responding to these concerns is a matter of institutional legitimacy as much as of rule-making. The IOC has announced ongoing reviews of the Olympic programme and the Olympic Charter, including proposals that would give the Executive Board more flexibility in deciding which sports are included. Supporters see this as necessary modernisation, while critics warn that less rule-bound decisions could make the process harder to scrutinise. How these reforms are implemented, and whether they are seen as fair by athletes, host cities and the public, will shape the movement's standing in the coming decades.

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