Copyright (c) International Olympic Committee

The Olympic Games are among one of the biggest sporting spectacles in the world, and were normally held once every four years. The first Olympics ever to be staged in the modern era took place in 1896, at Athens, Greece. The country was the ancient birthplace of the Olympics, consequently Athens was perceived to be an appropriate choice to stage the inaugural modern Games.

The Winter Olympics, however, was created in 1924 when Chamonix, a ski resort village situated in the French alps, hosted the "International Winter Sports Week". With the success of the event, it was retroactively designated by the International Olympic Committee as the first Winter Games. Its origins come from the Nordic Games, which were organized by General Viktor Gustaf Balck in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1901 and were held again in both 1903 and 1905, and then every fourth year thereafter until 1926. Balck was a charter member of the IOC and a close friend to Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement. He attempted to have winter sports, specifically figure skating, added to the Olympic programme but was unsuccessful until the 1908 Summer Games in London.

The Olympics have been broadcasted on television since the Berlin Summer Games in 1936, but either to only a limited local audience or on tape delay for other countries. By 1948 in London, the Olympics were present in people’s living rooms, with live coverage allowing 500,000 people to follow the competitions up to 200km away from the stadium.

The 1956 Winter Games in Cortina d'Ampezzo were the first Winter Olympics to be broadcast to a multi-national audience, with Italian public broadcaster RAI leading the way in this historic coverage. The broadcasts were relayed live via Eurovision to 9 EBU member countries. The Cortina Games did not generate revenue from television (the 1960 Winter Games in Squaw Valley were the first to do so), but it has been an experiment in the feasibility of televising an international sporting event.

In the years that followed, the range just kept growing, now allowing the entire world to follow the same event; that example was the Tokyo Summer Games in 1964, which had then became known as the “TV Olympics” for bringing live Olympic sports to a worldwide audience. The 1964 Games were a huge hit in Japan as well, and were a signature event for NHK, which had just begun TV broadcasting in 1960.

In 2001, the IOC established Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), the body responsible for filming all the competitions at the Olympics and making these images, edited in real time and enhanced with graphics and animations, to the world’s broadcasters; this is known as the “world feed”.

1. Innsbruck, Austria (1976)
2. Lake Placid, New York, USA (1980)
3. Sarajevo, Yugoslavia (1984)
4. Calgary, Alberta, Canada (1988)
5. Albertville, France (1992)
6. Lillehammer, Norway (1994)
7. Nagano, Japan (1998)
8. Salt Lake City, Utah, USA (2002)
9. Turin, Italy (2006)
10. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (2010)
11. Sochi, Russia (2014)
12. PyeongChang, South Korea (2018)
13. Beijing, China (2022)