Olympic Games host cities

The history of the Olympic Games
The Olympic Games date back to ancient times. According to the traditional ancient calendar, the first official Olympic Games were held in 776 BC. The venue was the scared grove of Olympia located in present-day Greece. The most important sporting event of ancient times was held every four years even back then and was a part of the Panhellenic Games. The Olympic Games continued to be held until 393 AD, when the Roman Kaiser Theodosius I banned all pagan religious ceremonies a few decades after Greece was conquered.
Following the ancient tradition, the modern Olympic Games were introduced in 1894 on the important initiative of Pierre de Coubertin. They were held for the first time in Athens in 1896 and were hugely popular. This led to steadily adding more and more games and the first Winter Olympic Games were carried out in Chamonix in 1924. From this time onwards, the Summer and Winter Olympic Games took place every four years. The alternating rhythm that we are familiar with nowadays has only been in existence since 1992. The time period surrounding the games is known as the Olympics.
However, the over one-hundred-year history of the Olympic Games was not without its incidents and controversies. The 1916 Summer Games and the 1940 and 1944 Summer and Winter Games were cancelled because of the First and Second World Wars. Due to strict Australian quarantine regulations , the horse-racing competitions of the Melbourne 1956 Summer Games were held in Stockholm.
Furthermore, the Olympic Games were repeatedly criticised for corruption, assassinations, boycotts and other human rights violations. The use of doping as an illegal performance enhancement has also always been one of the main problems.

International Olympic Committee (IOC)
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is the Olympic Movement’s umbrella organisation. The IOC is a central actor in the world of sport and has its registered office in Lausanne, Switzerland. Founded in 1894, the IOC currently has 206 participating nations. The youngest nation member is South Sudan, which joined in 2015 and competed for the first time in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, like Kosovo. It is interesting to note that the IOC has more members than the United Nations (UN). The reason behind this is that IOC grants membership to nations that do not fulfil the UN’s requirements for political sovereignty.
IOC’s area of responsibilities include organising, implementing and awarding the Olympic Games. Furthermore, the IOC determines the Olympic Sport programme and promotes sport in general and the public’s interest in it.

Medals table
Out of the 232 nations in total that have participated, 156 members have won at least one medal. Some of the nations do not actually exist anymore (e.g. the Soviet Union, North and South Yemen, etc.) The most successful nation by a distance is the USA with 2,959 medals, followed by USSR and Great Britain with 1,204 and 950 medals respectively. What’s surprising is that only three nations – Norway, Austria and Liechtenstein – have received more medals at the Winter Olympics than at its summer counterpart. The United States are the most successful nation in the Summer Games, with 2,629 medals. Norway is top for the Winter Games with 405 medals. With a total of 53 times each, France, Britain and Switzerland have participated the most times in the Olympic Games.

Switzerland
Switzerland has taken part in 29 Summer and 24 Winter Olympic games to date (2022). These resulted in 116 gold, 126 silver and 132 bronze medals. 206 medals were won at the Summer Games and 168 at the Winter. Switzerland has twice hosted the Olympic Games twice - in 1928 and 1948, both of which were held in St. Moritz.