The Modern Olympic Games
23 Jun 1894 – ongoing76 items
olympicsAthens to Paris, one host city at a time
In 1896 about 240 men from fourteen nations met in a marble stadium in Athens. In 2024 Paris gave exactly half of its 10,500 places to women. This timeline follows the modern Games from the Sorbonne congress that founded them in 1894 to the Milano Cortina Winter Games of 2026, and the map moves from one host city to the next, across five continents.
How it is laid out
Every Summer Games that was held, thirty of them, is a band at its main stadium. From 1924 a band runs from the opening to the closing ceremony; the early Games, spread over months with no ceremony to speak of, run from their first event to their last.
Ten of the twenty-five Winter Games: Chamonix 1924, Oslo 1952, Sapporo 1972, Lake Placid 1980, Sarajevo 1984, Lillehammer 1994, Salt Lake City 2002, Sochi 2014, Beijing 2022 and Milano Cortina 2026, chosen for a first or a story.
The defining moments sit inside their Games; the massacre, the boycotts and the cancelled Games stand on their own. Long bands mark the eras: the Cold War rivalry, the boycott years, and the decades when Winter and Summer shared a year.
Two calendars
Greece kept the Julian calendar until 1923, so Athens opened its Games on 25 March 1896 by its own reckoning, which was 6 April in the rest of Europe. The Athens band and Spyridon Louis’s marathon are entered as Athens dated them, and drawn where they fall.
Threads to filter by
athletics: the track and the marathon, Louis to Boltwomen: from 22 women in 1900 to parity in 2024records: marks that stopped a stadiumboycott,cold warandrights: the Games and the politics they could not keep outwinter: the Winter Games in this selection
The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. — the Olympic creed, which Pierre de Coubertin adapted from a sermon preached during the London Games of 1908
Dates, entries and results follow Olympedia and the International Olympic Committee’s records.
Items
The IOC is founded at the Sorbonne
Spyridon Louis wins the marathon
Charlotte Cooper, the first woman Olympic champion
Jim Thorpe wins the decathlon
Berlin 1916 is cancelled
Paavo Nurmi wins two finals in an afternoon
Jesse Owens wins his fourth gold
The Stoke Mandeville Games
Emil Zátopek wins the marathon, his third gold
“Blood in the Water”: Hungary beats the Soviet Union
Abebe Bikila wins the marathon barefoot
The Tlatelolco massacre
Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise their fists
Bob Beamon jumps 8.90 metres
Black September takes the Israeli team hostage
The hostages are killed at Fürstenfeldbruck
“The Games must go on”
African nations walk out of Montreal
Nadia Comăneci scores a perfect 10
The “Miracle on Ice”
The US Olympic Committee votes to boycott Moscow
The Soviet Union announces it will boycott Los Angeles
Joan Benoit wins the first women’s Olympic marathon
Ben Johnson wins the 100 metres in 9.79
FIBA opens Olympic basketball to NBA players
The Dream Team wins gold
A bomb explodes in Centennial Olympic Park
Cathy Freeman wins the 400 metres
Usain Bolt runs 9.69
Tokyo 2020 is postponed
The opening ceremony sails down the Seine