What is the Olympic Games?

 

The Olympic Games is an international sport competition who opposes every nations who wants to participate. The last ones, which took place in Rio, had gathered 204 National Olympic Committee and 11 362 athletes in total competing in more than 306 events.

The Summer Games are organized every 4 years in a city of the world which needs to apply more than 7 years before the day of the opening ceremony. The next ones will be in Tokyo, Japan, in 2020 and for the 2024 Olympic Games, two cities are still in the list to be chosen: Los Angeles and Paris. The vote for 2024 will be operated during the 130th ceremony of the IOC (the international Olympic committee). The IOC is a not-for-profit independent international organization made up of volunteers. The IOC President presides over all its activities, while the IOC Session and Executive Board are responsible for taking the main decisions for the organization.

There is actually 4 types of Olympic games, the Summer Games are the most famous ones, followed by the Winter Games (which has completely different events and sports such as ice-skating). These Winter Games also takes place every four years but on non-leap year, the next ones will be in Korea in 2018. The Paralympics' games is also a different type of games, they only involve disabled and handicapped athletes who will be competing against each other in the same sport disciplines as the Summer ones. Finally the Youth Olympic Games is the perfect copy of the Olympic Games but they are only reserved to champions from 14 to 18 years old. They are the most recent ones as they have been created only 10 years ago after the 119th ceremony of the IOC. They are composed of Summer and Winter Games.

 

When were they created? What is their history?

 

The first ancient Olympic games were organized centuries before our era. They would normally took place in Greece, in Olympia during religious festival in honor of Gods.

The last of these are dated 393 after J-C following the treaty of Theodose who made the obligation of giving up the ancient Greek religion.

In 1894, Baron Pierre De Coubertin, a French historian, tried and succeeded to establish the basis of our modern games. After re-discovering through, his work, ancient civilizations.

He, as well, conceived the IOC which composes the main body of the Games. At the beginning, the Olympic Games were only an unknown, empty competition. As a result, the Olympics has shifted away from pure amateurism, as envisioned by Coubertin, to allowing participation of professional athletes. Mass medias are what permitted the commercialization of the games and are the cause of the sponsorships that have now a tremendous utility in scheduling and actually making the Games. Nations now see a real potential in those games to show up their power. As an example, the Soviets during the cold war (and for Russia still in the last few decades) had chosen to make their athletes take drugs so that they had way bigger chances to win a Gold Medal.

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Arnaud T.