Summer Olympic Games

• 1. Introduction

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  The Summer Olympic Games began on the 6th of April 1896 in Athens, with fewer than 250 male competitors and representatives from just 14 nations. One woman, Stamata Revithi, was refused entry to the marathon and ran the course alone anyway, declaring that the committee could not stop her. That single act of defiance captures something essential about what the Games would become: a stage where the personal and the political collide under the gaze of the entire world.

  From those 42 events in Athens to 339 events at Tokyo in 2020, with more than 11,000 competitors from 206 nations, the Summer Olympics have grown into the largest multi-sport international event on Earth. The questions worth asking are not just about who ran faster or jumped higher. They are about who was let in and who was kept out, who profited and who paid, and what it costs a city and a nation to hold the world's attention for a few weeks every four years.

• 2. Athens 1896: A Fragile Start

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  About 100,000 people crowded into the Panathinaiko Stadium on the opening day in 1896, filling what was described as the first big stadium in the modern world beyond capacity. Most of the athletes on the track were Greek, yet it was the Americans who collected the most victories, with eleven gold medals to Greece's ten.

  The idea for the Games came from Pierre de Coubertin, a French pedagogue and historian who believed sporting competition could build international understanding. He convened a congress in Paris on the 23rd of June 1894, and the gathered delegates unanimously chose Athens as the first host city and established the International Olympic Committee at the same meeting.

  The event that stopped the stadium was the marathon. Spiridon Louis, a water carrier from Greece, crossed the finish line in 2 hours, 58 minutes and 50 seconds, and the crowd erupted. The German competitor Carl Schuhmann earned the most individual success of those Games, claiming four gold medals across wrestling and gymnastics. So enthusiastic were Greek spectators and officials that many athletes petitioned for Athens to remain the permanent host. The IOC declined, rotating the Games to Paris instead, though the argument for a permanent Greek home would surface again.

• 3. Women, Amateurism, and Early Tensions

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  At the 1900 Paris Games, 22 women competed officially for the first time, taking part in five sports including croquet, golf, sailing, and tennis. Those Games were entangled with the Paris World's Fair and stretched over five months, blurring the line between Olympic competition and exhibition.

  The question of who counted as an amateur haunted the early Games. At Stockholm in 1912, Jim Thorpe won both the decathlon and the pentathlon, establishing himself as perhaps the greatest all-round athlete of his era. His medals were then stripped because he had once played a few games of minor-league baseball for pay, which the rules treated as professional activity. The complaint was led by Avery Brundage. Thorpe died without his medals, which were not reinstated until 1983, thirty years after his death.

  The 1908 London Games introduced the marathon distance still used today: 42.195 kilometres, a length chosen so the race would finish in front of the royal family's viewing box. Near that finish line, Italian runner Dorando Pietri entered the stadium in first place but collapsed from exhaustion and was helped over the line by officials, earning him disqualification. Queen Alexandra consoled him with a gilded silver cup. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a report on the race for the Daily Mail. Great Britain won 146 medals at those London Games, 99 more than second-placed America, a haul that remains the nation's best to this day.

• 4. War, Politics, and Protest

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  The 1916 Berlin Games were cancelled because of World War I, and the 1940 and 1944 Games were cancelled because of World War II. London absorbed both disruptions, losing its planned 1944 Games and then hosting the first post-war Games in 1948, with Germany and Japan excluded from competition.

  Political protest found a vivid outlet at Mexico City in 1968. After winning gold and bronze in the men's 200 metres, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists during the medal ceremony, wearing black socks without shoes. The IOC expelled both athletes from the Games. In the same Games, Czechoslovak gymnast Vera Caslavska turned her face away from the Soviet flag during her medal ceremony as a quiet protest against the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of her country. She returned home a hero, then was made an outcast by the Soviet-backed government.

  The 1980 Moscow Games were boycotted by 66 nations, including the United States, Canada, West Germany, and Japan, following the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. Only 80 nations competed, the smallest attendance since 1956. Four years later, the Soviet Union and 13 allies returned the boycott by staying away from the 1984 Los Angeles Games, though Romania and Yugoslavia did attend. A document obtained in 2016 revealed that Soviet preparations for Los Angeles had included a detailed state-sponsored doping programme, written by Dr. Sergei Portugalov of the Institute for Physical Culture.

• 5. Munich 1972: Terror at the Village

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  On the 5th of September 1972, a Palestinian group called Black September broke into the apartment of the Israeli delegation inside the Olympic village in Munich. Two Israeli team members were killed immediately. Nine others were taken hostage, with the captors demanding that Israel release a large number of prisoners.

  The standoff lasted hours. German authorities attempted an ambush at the airport when the captors were offered safe passage. In the firefight that followed, all nine hostages died, along with five of the terrorists. Fifteen people in total were killed. After debate, the IOC decided to continue the Games.

  Athletic history was still made during those same days. Mark Spitz of the United States won seven gold medals, a single-Games record at the time. Finland's Lasse Viren won gold in both the 5,000 metres and the 10,000 metres, a double he would repeat at the 1976 Montreal Games, becoming the first athlete ever to win that distance double twice. Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut won three gold medals and performed a historic backflip off the high bar. In the men's basketball final, a disputed sequence in which the final three seconds were replayed three times ended with the Soviet Union winning 51-50; the United States team refused to accept their silver medals.

• 6. Money, Corruption, and the Modern Games

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  The 1976 Montreal Games cost $1.5 billion, far beyond any previous Olympic budget, driven in part by what investigators later concluded was large-scale fraud by contractors suspected of links to organised crime. One contractor, Giuseppe Zappia, faced fraud charges specifically related to Olympic construction work; he was cleared in 1988 after two key witnesses died before testifying.

  The financial burden prompted fears that the Olympics were no longer viable. The 1984 Los Angeles Games appeared to answer those fears, becoming what organisers called the first Games of a new era to turn a profit, with a record 140 National Olympic Committees participating despite the Soviet-led boycott.

  Doping became the other shadow over the late twentieth century. At Seoul in 1988, 100-metre winner Ben Johnson was among several athletes who failed mandatory drug tests. A 1989 Australian study on the Moscow Games stated that there was "hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games, certainly not a gold medal winner, who is not on one sort of drug or another." British journalist Andrew Jennings later reported that a KGB colonel confirmed agency officers had impersonated IOC anti-doping officials to interfere with testing at those same 1980 Games. The pattern continued: Dr. Sergei Portugalov, who drafted the Soviet doping memo for 1984, was also a central figure in the Russian doping programme that preceded the 2016 Rio Games.

• 7. Records and Remarkable Individuals

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  Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Games before a government that promoted theories of Aryan racial superiority, in front of Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Dutch sprinter Fanny Blankers-Koen matched that total in London in 1948, at an age when many competitors would have retired. Emil Zatopek at Helsinki in 1952 won the 5,000 metres, the 10,000 metres, and then entered the marathon, a race he had never run before, winning by two and a half minutes while pacing himself by chatting with other leaders.

  At Rome in 1960, a light-heavyweight boxer named Cassius Clay won gold; he later threw the medal into a river after being refused service at a whites-only restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky. He received a replacement medal 36 years later, at the 1996 Atlanta Games, by which point he was known as Muhammad Ali and visibly affected by Parkinson's disease as he lit the Olympic torch.

  Michael Phelps won eight gold medals at a single Games in Beijing in 2008, a new record. At those same Beijing Games, Usain Bolt of Jamaica became the first male athlete to set world records in the finals of both the 100 metres and 200 metres at the same Olympics. Norwegian hurdler Karsten Warholm broke his own world record in the 400 metre hurdles at Tokyo in 2020. In gymnastics, Nadia Comaneci of Romania scored what the judges recorded as perfect scores at Montreal in 1976; she won the women's all-around gold medal and posted perfect scores on the uneven bars, the balance beam, and in the all-around competition.

• 8. Hosting the Games

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  Paris and London have each hosted three times, with Los Angeles scheduled to do the same in 2028. The United States will then have hosted the Summer Games five times in total, in St. Louis, Los Angeles twice, Atlanta, and Los Angeles again. Brisbane will host in 2032, making Australia only the second country to host three Summer Olympics.

  Africa has never hosted. South America hosted for the first time when Rio de Janeiro staged the 2016 Games, and those Games were the first held entirely in the local winter season. The 2020 Tokyo Games were the first Olympics ever postponed, a decision prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic and announced by then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe alongside the IOC. They were also the first Games since 1900 to take place in a non-leap year.

  At the 2004 Athens Games, at least $7.2 billion was spent, including $1.5 billion on security alone. The 2024 Paris Games drew 8.3 million ticket sales, breaking the record set at Atlanta in 1996. For the opening ceremony in Paris, athletes paraded on boats along the River Seine rather than inside a stadium, a first in Olympic history. The open water swimming competitions were also held in the Seine. Only Great Britain has won at least one gold medal at every edition of the Summer Games.