Difference of Winter & Summer Games

The ancient Olympic Games can be traced as far back as 776 B.C. Staged in Olympia, Greece, the ancient Olympics were dedicated to Olympian gods and continued for almost 12 centuries before being banned by Emperor Theodisius in 393 A.D. There was then an interval of almost 1,500 years before Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the International Olympic Committee, announced his intentions to re-establish the Olympic movement. In honor of its birthplace, the first Olympic Games of the modern era were staged in Athens, Greece in 1896. It wasn't until 1924, however, that the first Winter Olympic Games took place in Chamonix, France.

  1. Number of Participants

    • The number of participants and countries represented at both the Summer and Winter Olympics has gradually increased over time. However, the number of participants at the Summer Games is far greater than the number of athletes who take part in the Winter Olympics. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, there were 10,942 athletes from 204 countries. In contrast, only 82 nations and approximately 2,500 athletes were present at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada.

    Events

    • The program for the Beijing Olympics featured 302 events across 28 sports. The Vancouver Olympics staged 86 events across 15 sports. Track and field, swimming, cycling, gymnastics, wrestling, weightlifting and boxing are staples of the Summer Olympic program, while alpine skiing, speed skating, cross-country skiing, biathlon and ski jumping form a considerable part of the Winter Olympic program.

    Host Cities

    • As of 2011, no city has ever hosted both the Summer and Winter Olympics. This is primarily because the geographic elements required to stage the Winter Games are not conducive to hosting the Summer Games and vice versa. The Winter Games traditionally haven taken place in smaller, less well-known cities, while the Summer Games are typically staged in larger, more recognizable locations. As of 2011, St. Moritz, Switzerland; Lake Placid, N.Y. and Innsbruck, Austria are the only cities to have hosted the Winter Olympic Games twice. Athens, Paris, London and Los Angeles are the only cities to have staged the Summer Olympic Games on two occasions. London will become the first city to host the Olympics for the third time in the summer of 2012.

    Boycotts

    • The Olympic movement has witnessed its fair share of controversies. In 1956, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland withdrew from the Summer Games in protest of the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary. Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and China also declined to compete. More than 20 African nations boycotted the 1976 Games in Montreal, while more than 60 countries refused to compete four years later in Moscow, following the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union and several Eastern European nations then refused to take part in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, citing safety concerns for their athletes. In 1988, North Korea refused to take part in the Seoul Olympics after their neighbors refused to let them co-host the event. In contrast, the only time a nation has boycotted the Winter Games was in 1980, when Taiwan refused to take part.