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.
It was unanimously chosen as the host city during a congress organized by Baron Pierre de Coubertin in Paris, on 23 June 1894. At that same time, the International Olympic Committee, or the IOC, was established. Despite many obstacles and setbacks, the 1896 Olympics were regarded as a great success, and it had the largest international participation of any sporting event to that date. The Olympics have increased in scope from a 42 competition event programme with fewer than 250 male competitors from 14 nations in 1896, to 306 medal events with 11,238 competitors (6,179 men, 5,059 women) from 206 nations in Rio 2016.
The Games have been broadcasted on television since the Berlin 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. After that, the range just kept growing, now allowing the entire world to follow the same event. That example was the 1964 Tokyo Games, which had then became known as the “TV Olympics” for bringing live Olympic sports to a worldwide audience. These 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”.
By 1984, 156 countries were showing that year's Olympics in Los Angeles, or more than half the world’s population. And so it went on, reaching a total of 4.8 billion viewers globally (or 69% of the world’s population) by the time of the 2012 London Olympics.
1. Moscow, USSR (1980)
2. Los Angeles, California, USA (1984)
3. Seoul, South Korea (1988)
4. Barcelona, Spain (1992)
5. Atlanta, Georgia, USA (1996)
6. Sydney, Australia (2000)
7. Athens, Greece (2004)
8. Beijing, China (2008)
9. London, United Kingdom (2012)
10. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2016)
11. Tokyo, Japan (2020/21)