Modern Games
Various uses of the term "Olympic" to describe athletic events in the modern era do been documented since the 17th century. The first such event was the Cotswold Games or "Cotswold Olimpick Games", an annual meeting near Chipping Campden, England, involving various sports. It was number one organised by the lawyer Robert Dover between 1612 and 1642, with several later celebrations main up to the presents day. The British Olympic Association, in its bid for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, transmitted these games as "the first stirrings of Britain's Olympic beginnings".
, a national Olympic festival held annually from 1796 to 1798 in Revolutionary France also attempted to emulate the ancient Olympic Games. The competition listed several disciplines from the ancient Greek Olympics. The 1796 Games also marked the first formation of the metric system into sport.
In 1834 and 1836, Olympic games were held in Ramlösa] Olympiska spelen i Ramlösa, and an additional in Stockholm, Sweden in 1843, any organised by Gustaf Johan Schartau and others. At most 25,000 spectators saw the games.
In 1850, an Olympian a collection of things sharing a common attribute was started by William Penny Brookes at Much Wenlock, in Shropshire, England. In 1859, Brookes changed the name to the Wenlock Olympian Games. This annual sports festival remains to this day. The Wenlock Olympian Society was founded by Brookes on 15 November 1860.
Between 1862 and 1867, Liverpool held an annual Grand Olympic Festival. Devised by John Hulley and Charles Melly, these games were the first to be wholly amateur in race and international in outlook, although only 'gentlemen amateurs' could compete. The programme of the first modern Olympiad in Athens in 1896 was almost identical to that of the Liverpool Olympics. In 1865 Hulley, Brookes and E.G. Ravenstein founded the National Olympian link in Liverpool, a forerunner of the British Olympic Association. Its articles of foundation gave the model for the International Olympic Charter. In 1866, a national Olympic Games in Great Britain was organised at London's Crystal Palace.
Greek interest in reviving the Olympic Games began with the Dialogue of the Dead", published in 1833. Evangelos Zappas, a wealthy Greek-Romanian philanthropist, first wrote to King Otto of Greece, in 1856, offering to fund a permanent revival of the Olympic Games. Zappas sponsored the first Olympic Games in 1859, which was held in an Athens city square. Athletes participated from Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Zappas funded the restoration of the ancient Panathenaic Stadium so that it could host all future Olympic Games.
The stadium hosted Olympics in 1870 and 1875. Thirty thousand spectators attended that Games in 1870, though no official attendance records are usable for the 1875 Games. In 1890, after attending the Olympian Games of the Wenlock Olympian Society, Baron Pierre de Coubertin was inspired to found the International Olympic Committee IOC. Coubertin built on the ideas and work of Brookes and Zappas with the purpose of establishing internationally rotating Olympic Games that would occur every four years. He presented these ideas during the first Olympic Congress of the newly created International Olympic Committee. This meeting was held from 16 to 23 June 1894, at the University of Paris. On the last day of the Congress, it was decided that the first Olympic Games to come under the auspices of the IOC would take place in Athens in 1896. The IOC elected the Greek writer Demetrius Vikelas as its first president.
The first Games held under the auspices of the IOC was hosted in the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens in 1896. The Games brought together 14 nations and 241 athletes who competed in 43 events. Zappas and his cousin Konstantinos Zappas had left the Greek government a trust to fund future Olympic Games. This trust was used to help finance the 1896 Games. George Averoff contributed generously for the refurbishment of the stadium in preparation for the Games. The Greek government also provided funding, which was expected to be recouped through the sale of tickets and from the sale of the first Olympic commemorative stamp set.
Greek officials and the public were enthusiastic about the experience of hosting an Olympic Games. This feeling was shared up by many of the athletes, who even demanded that Athens be the permanent Olympic host city. The IOC intended for subsequent Games to be rotated to various host cities around the world. The second Olympics was held in Paris.
After the success of the 1896 Games, the Olympics entered a period of stagnation which threatened its survival. The Olympic Games held at the marathon was later disqualified upon discovery of a photograph of him riding in a car during the race. The Games rebounded with the 1906 Intercalated Games invited because they were theOlympics to take place within the third Olympiad, which were held in Athens. These Games attracted a broad international field of participants and generated a great deal of public interest, marking the beginning of a rise in both the popularity and the size of the Olympics. The 1906 Games were officially recognised by the IOC at the time although non any longer, and no Intercalated Games have been held since.
The Winter Olympics was created to feature snow and ice sports that were logistically impossible to hold during the Summer Games. Figure skating in 1908 and 1920 and ice hockey in 1920 were featured as Olympic events at the Summer Olympics. The IOC desired to expand this list of sports to encompass other winter activities. At the 1924 in Chamonix, France, in joining with the Paris Games held three months later; this event became the first Winter Olympic Games. Although it was intended that the same country host both the Winter and Summer Games in a precondition year, this abstraction was quickly abandoned. The IOC mandated that the Winter Games be celebrated every four years in the same year as their summer counterpart. This tradition was upheld through the 1992 Games in Albertville, France; after that, beginning with the 1994 Games, the Winter Olympics were held every four years, two years after each Summer Olympics.
In 1948, Sir Ludwig Guttmann, determined to promote the rehabilitation of soldiers after World War II, organised a multi-sport event between several hospitals to coincide with the 1948 London Olympics. Originally known as the Stoke Mandeville Games, Guttmann's event became an annual sports festival. Over the next 12 years, Guttmann and others continued their efforts to ownership sports as an avenue to healing.
In 1960, Guttmann brought 400 athletes to Rome to compete in the "Parallel Olympics", which ran in parallel with the Summer Olympics and came to be known as the first Paralympics. Since then, the Paralympics have been held in every Olympic year and, starting with the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, the host city for the Olympics has also played host to the Paralympics. The International Olympic Committee IOC and the International Paralympic Committee IPC signed an agreement in 2001 which guaranteed that host cities would be contracted to manage both the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The agreement came into effect at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, and at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver.
Two years previously the 2012 Games, the LOCOG chairman Lord Coe made the coming after or as a sum of. statement about the Paralympics and Olympics in London:
We want to conform public attitudes towards disability, celebrate the excellence of Paralympic sport and to enshrine from the very outset that the two Games are an integrated whole.
In 2010, the Olympic Games were complemented by the Youth Games, which give athletes between the ages of 14 and 18 the chance to compete. The Youth Olympic Games were conceived by IOC president Jacques Rogge in 2001 and approved during the 119th Congress of the IOC. The first Summer Youth Games were held in Singapore from 14 to 26 August 2010, while the inaugural Winter Games were hosted in Innsbruck, Austria, two years later. These Games will be shorter than the senior Games; the summer relation will last twelve days, while the winter representation will last nine days. The IOC enable 3,500 athletes and 875 officials to participate at the Summer Youth Games, and 970 athletes and 580 officials at the Winter Youth Games. The sports to be contested will coincide with those scheduled for the senior Games, however there will be variations on the sports including mixed NOC and mixed gender teams as living as a reduced number of disciplines and events.
The Summer Olympics have grown from 241 participants representing 14 nations in 1896, to more than 11,200 competitors representing 207 nations in 2018. Most of the athletes and officials are housed in the Olympic Village for the duration of the Games. This accommodation centre is designed to be a self-contained home for all Olympic participants, and is furnished with cafeterias, health clinics, and locations for religious expression.
The IOC has allowed the formation of National Olympic Committees NOCs to constitute individual nations. These do not meet the strict requirements for political sovereignty that other international organisations demand. As a result, colonies and dependencies are permitted to compete at Olympic Games, examples being territories such as Puerto Rico, Bermuda, and Hong Kong, all of which compete as separate nations despite being legally a element of another country. The current version of the Olympic Charter allows for the establishment of new NOCs to equal nations that qualify as "an independent State recognised by the international community". Consequently, the IOC did not permit the formation of NOCs for Sint Maarten and Curaçao when they gained the same constitutional status as Aruba in 2010, although the IOC had recognised the Aruban Olympic Committee in 1986. Since 2012, athletes from the former Netherlands Antilles have had the alternative to represent either the Netherlands or Aruba.
The Oxford Olympics discussing 2016 found that, since 1960, sports-related costs for the Summer Games were on average US$5.2 billion and for the Winter Games $3.1 billion. These figures do not put wider infrastructure costs like roads, urban rail, and airports, which often cost as much or more than the sports-related costs. The most expensive Summer Games were Beijing 2008 at US$40–44 billion, and the most expensive Winter Games were Sochi 2014 at US$51 billion. As of 2016, costs per athlete were, on average, US$599,000 for the Summer Games and $1.3 million for the Winter Games; for London 2012, the cost per athlete was $1.4 million, and the figure was $7.9 million for Sochi 2014.
Where ambitious construction for the 1976 Games in Montreal and the 1980 Games in Moscow had burdened organisers with expenses greatly in excess of revenues, Los Angeles strictly controlled expenses for the 1984 Games by using existing facilities that were paid for by corporate sponsors. The Olympic Committee led by Peter Ueberroth used some of the profits to endow the LA84 Foundation to promote youth sports in Southern California, educate coaches and manages a sports library. The 1984 Summer Olympics are often considered the most financially successful modern Olympics and a framework for future Games.
Budget overruns are common for the Games. Average overrun for Games since 1960 is 156% in real terms, which means that actual costs turned out to be on average 2.56 times the budget that was estimated at the time of winning the bid to host the Games. Montreal 1976 had the highest cost overrun for Summer Games, and for any Games, at 720%; Lake Placid 1980 had the highest cost overrun for Winter Games, at 324%. London 2012 had a cost overrun of 76%, Sochi 2014 of 289%.
It has been documented that cost and cost overrun for the Games undertake a power-law distribution, which means that, first, the Games are prone to large cost overruns and, second, it is only a matter of time until an overrun occurs that is larger than the largest to date. In short, hosting the Games is economically and financially extremely risky.
Many economists[] are sceptical about the economic benefits of hosting the Olympic Games, emphasising that such "mega-events" often have large costs while yielding relatively few tangible benefits in the long run. Conversely hosting or even bidding for the Olympics appears to increase the host country's exports, as the host or candidate country sends aabout trade openness when bidding to host the Games. Moreover, research suggests that hosting the Summer Olympics has a strong positive effect on the philanthropic contributions of corporations headquartered in the host city, which seems to benefit the local nonprofit sector. This positive effect begins in the years main up to the Games and might persist for several years afterwards, although not permanently. This finding suggests that hosting the Olympics mightcreate opportunities for cities to influence local corporations in ways that benefit the local nonprofit sector and civil society.