The Olympic Games are an international multi-sport event established for both summer and winter sports. There have been two generations of the Olympic Games; the first were the Ancient Olympic Games (Greek: Ολυμπιακοί Αγώνες; 
[Olympiakoi Agones] (help·info)) held at Olympia, Greece. The second, known as the Modern Olympic Games, were first revived in 1895 by the Greek philanthropist Evangelis Zappas, in Athens, Greece.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded in 1894 on the initiative of a French nobleman, Pierre Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, and has become the governing body of the Olympic Movement, a conglomeration of sporting federations responsible for the organization of the Games. The evolution of the Olympic Movement during the 20th century forced the IOC to adapt its own vision of the Games in several ways. The original ideal of a pure amateur athlete had to change under the pressure of corporate sponsorships and political regimes.
The modern Olympics feature the traditional Summer and the Winter Games, along with the more recent Paralympic and Youth Olympic Games, each with a summer and winter version. Participation in the Games has increased to the point that nearly every nation on Earth is represented. This growth has created numerous challenges, including political boycotts, the use of performance enhancing drugs, bribery of officials, and terrorism. The Games encompass many rituals and symbols established during its beginning, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of these traditions are displayed in the opening and closing ceremonies, and the medal presentations. Despite the current complexity of the Games, the focus remains on the Olympic motto: "Citius, Altius, Fortius" — "Faster, Higher, Stronger".
Ancient Olympics
Main article: Ancient Olympic Games
Stadium in Olympia, Greece
There are many myths surrounding the origin of the ancient Olympic Games; the most popular identifies Heracles and his father Zeus as the progenitors of the Games.[1] According to the legend, Zeus held sporting events in honor of his defeat of Cronus and succession to the throne of heaven.[2] Heracles, his eldest son, defeated his brothers in a running race and was crowned with a wreath of wild olive branches.[3] It is Heracles who first called the Games "Olympic" and established the custom of holding them every four years.[1] One popular story claims that after Heracles completed his twelve labors, he went on to build the Olympic stadium and surrounding buildings as an honor to Zeus. After the stadium was complete, he walked in a straight line for 200 steps and called this distance a "stadion" (Greek: στάδιον, Latin: stadium, "stage"), which later became a unit of distance. Another myth associates the first Games with the ancient Greek concept of Olympic truce (ἐκεχειρία, ekecheiria). The most widely held estimate for the inception of the Ancient Olympics is 776 BC. Inscriptions have been found of the winners of a footrace held every four years starting in 776 BC with Koroebus, who became the first Olympic champion.[4] From then on, the Olympic Games quickly became important throughout ancient Greece. They reached their zenith in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. The Olympics were of fundamental religious importance, featuring sporting events alongside ritual sacrifices honoring both Zeus (whose colossal statue stood at Olympia) and Pelops, divine hero and mythical king of Olympia. Pelops was famous for his legendary chariot race with King Oenomaus of Pisatis.[5] The winners of the events were admired and immortalized in poems and statues.[6][7] The Games were held every four years, known as an Olympiad, and this period was used by Greeks as one of their units of time measurement. The Games were part of a cycle known as the Panhellenic Games, which included the Pythian Games, the Nemean Games, and the Isthmian Games.[8]
Gradually, though, the Games declined in importance as the Romans gained power and influence in Greece. There is conjecture that Roman emperor Theodosius I, in an attempt to re-assert Christianity as the official religion of the Empire, outlawed the Games in 393 AD due to its perceived links with paganism.[9][10] After the demise of the Olympics, they were not held again for another 1,500 years.
Further information: Cotswold Games and Wenlock Olympian Society Annual Games
Baron Pierre de Coubertin
Although the revival of the Olympic Games began in the mid-19th century, multi-sport events with titles such as "Olympick" or "Olympian" Games had been held as far back as the 16th century.[11] These events included an "Olympick Games" that convened for several years at Chipping Campden, in the English Cotswolds. The present day Cotswold Games trace their origin to this festival.[11] Another example of European attempts to emulate the Olympic Games was L'Olympiade de la République, an Olympic festival held annually, from 1796 to 1798, in Revolutionary France.[12] The competition included several disciplines from the ancient Greek Olympics. The 1796 Games also marked the introduction of the metric system into sport.[12]
In 1850 an Olympian Class began at Much Wenlock, in Shropshire, England. It was renamed the Wenlock Olympian Games in 1859, and continues today as the Wenlock Olympian Society Annual Games. In 1866, a national Olympic Games in Great Britain was organized by Dr. William Penny Brookes at London's Crystal Palace.[13]
Greek interest in reviving the Olympic Games began after the country's independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1829 and was first proposed by poet and newspaper editor Panagiotis Soutsos in his poem "Dialogue of the Dead", published in 1833. Evangelis Zappas, a wealthy Greek philanthropist, sponsored the revival of the ancient Olympic Games. The first modern international Olympic Games was held in 1859 in an Athens city square with participants from Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Later Zappas paid for the complete restoration of the ruins of the ancient Panathenian Stadium so that it could stage two further editions of the Games, one in 1870 and a second in 1875.[14]
French historian Baron Pierre de Coubertin was searching for a reason for the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). He theorized that the French soldiers had not received proper physical education.[15] In 1890 after attending the Olympian Games of the Wenlock Olympian Society, Coubertin decided that a large-scale revival of the Olympic Games was achievable.[16] Until that time, attempts to create a modern version of the ancient Olympic Games had met with various amounts of success at the local (one, or at most two, participating nations) level.
Coubertin built on the ideas of Brookes and Zappas with the aim to internationalize the Olympic Games.[16] He presented these ideas during the first Olympic Congress of the newly created International Olympic Committee (IOC). This meeting was held from June 16 to June 23, 1894, at the Sorbonne University in Paris. On the last day of the Congress, it was decided that the first multinational Olympic Games would take place two years later in Athens.[17] The IOC was fully responsible for the Games' organization, and, for that purpose, elected the Greek writer Demetrius Vikelas as its first president.[18]
Main article: 1896 Olympic Games
Opening ceremony of the 1896 Summer Olympics, at the Panathinaiko Stadium in Athens
There were fewer than 250 athletes at the first Olympic Games of the modern times. The Panathenian Stadium, restored for Zappas's Games of 1870 and 1875, was refurbished a second time in preparation for this inaugural edition.[19] These Olympics featured nine sporting disciplines: athletics, cycling, fencing, gymnastics, shooting, swimming, tennis, weightlifting, and wrestling; rowing events were scheduled for competition but had to be cancelled due to bad weather conditions.[20] The Greek officials and public were enthusiastic about the experience of hosting the inaugural Games. This feeling was shared by many of the athletes, who even demanded that Athens be the host of the Olympic Games on a permanent basis. The IOC had, however, envisaged these modern Olympics to be an itinerating and truly global event, and thus decided differently, planning for the second edition to take place in Paris.[21]
Main article: Summer Olympic Games
After the initial success of the 1896 Games, the Olympics endured a struggling period that threatened their survival. The celebrations in Paris in 1900 and St. Louis in 1904 were overshadowed by the World's Fair exhibitions, which were held at the same time frames and locations. The St. Louis Games, for example, hosted 650 athletes, but 580 were originally from the United States. The homogenous nature of these editions was a low point for the Olympic Movement,[22] even though it was in Paris that women were first allowed to compete.[23] The Games rebounded when the 1906 Intercalated Games (so-called because they were the second Games held within the third Olympiad) were held in Athens. The Intercalated Games are not officially recognized as an official Olympic Games, and no later Intercalated Games have been held. These Games attracted a broad international field of participants, and generated great public interest. This marked the beginning of a rise in both the popularity and the size of the Games.[24]
Main article: Winter Olympic Games
Ice hockey game during the 1928 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz
While both figure skating (1908 and 1920 Games) and ice hockey (1920 Games) had featured as Olympic events at the Summer Olympics, the IOC looked upon equity between winter and summer sports. At the 1921 Congress, in Lausanne, it decided to hold a winter version of the Olympic Games. The first Winter Olympics were held in 1924 in Chamonix, France, though they were only officialy recognized by the IOC as such in the following year.[25] The IOC made the Winter Games a permanent fixture in the Olympic Movement in 1925 and mandated that they be celebrated every four years on the same year as their Summer counterpart.[26] This tradition was maintained until the 1992 Games in Albertville, France; after that, beginning with the 1994 Games, further Winter Games have been held on the third year of each Olympiad.
Main article: Paralympics
In 1948 Sir Ludwig Guttman, determined to innovate new ways to rehabilitate soldiers after World War II, organized a multi-sport event between various hospitals to coincide with the 1948 London Olympics. Guttman's event, known then as the Stoke Mandeville Games, became an annual sports festival. Over the next twelve years, Guttman and others continued their efforts to use sports as an avenue to healing. For the 1960 Olympic Games, in Rome, Guttman brought 400 athletes to compete in the "Parallel Olympics", which became known as the first Paralympics. Since then, the Paralympics have been held in every Olympic year; since the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, the host city for the Olympics has also played host to the Paralympics.[27]
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