The Reborn of the Olympic Games

On April 6, 1896, the Olympic Games are reborn in Athens after being banned by the roman Emperor Theodosius I for 1,500 years. King George I of Greece welcomed the crowd of about 60,000 spectators and athletes from 13 nations into the competition with, “I hereby proclaim the opening of the first International Olympic Games at Athens.” The first Olympic Games were held in the city of Elis in 776 B.C. The Olympics were at least 500 years old at the time. Every four years, the ancient Olympics were to be held during a religious festival honoring Zeus, the Greek god. In the beginning, the events were limited to foot races, but eventually numerous events were added, including boxing, wrestling, horse and chariot racing, and military competitions. The Pentathlon was introduced in 708 B.C., which featured events like the footrace, the long jump, discus and javelin throws, and wrestling. However, the Olympics declined in 393 A.D. due to the rise of Rome. Theodosius I abolished the games in effort to suppress paganism in the Roman Empire.

During the Renaissance, Europe became fascinated with ancient Greek culture, and some staged sporting and folkloric festivals using the name “Olympic Games.” It wasn’t until 1892 that Pierre de Coubertin proposed the idea that the Olympics should be a major international competition that would occur every four years. Coubertin raised the idea again at the conference on international competition in Paris in June 1894 in front of 79 delegates who unanimously approved his proposal. The international Olympic Committee (IOC) was formed, and the first games were planned for Athens in 1896.

280 participants from 13 nations competed in 43 events, including, swimming, weightlifting, track-and-field, gymnastics,...

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...llion, various factors caused the budget to expand to over $51 billion, surpassing the estimated $44 billion cost of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing which was the most expensive Olympics in history.

A total of 295 medals were awarded during the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Russia receiving the largest amount of medals as 33 followed by Norway, Canada, United states, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Belarus, Austria, and France. Sochi's medal design was unveiled in May 2013. The design was intended to resemble Sochi's landscape, with a section containing a "patchwork quilt" of diamonds representing mountains. Those who won gold medals on 15 February received special medals with fragments of the Chelyabinsk meteor, which marked the one-year anniversary of the event where pieces of the cosmic pieces fell into the Chebarkul Lake in the Ural Mountains in central Russia.