Members of the Perseus Project created this exhibit on the ancient Olympics in 1996, as a tribute to the Centennial Olympic Games held in Atlanta, Georgia. In this exhibit, you can compare ancient and modern Olympic sports, tour the site of Olympia as it looks today, learn about the context of the Games and the Olympic spirit, or read about the Olympic athletes who were famous in ancient times.

Olympic Games, athletic festival that originated in ancient Greece and was revived in the late 19th century. Before the 1970s the Games were officially limited to competitors with amateur status, but in the 1980s many events were opened to professional athletes. Currently the Games are open to all, even the top professional athletes in basketball and football (soccer).

The IOC is committed to building a better world through sport. Our global activities extend far beyond the staging of the Games. This site contains a list of Olympic sports and participating countries. The About page contains information on drugs in sport, healthy bodies, women in sport, social development, hope and other issues.

Developments in technology. In little over a century, the Olympic Games have become a global event. Two major technological revolutions have contributed to this: in transport and the media.

When the XXVIII Olympiad opens in Athens, get ready for the bursts of national pride. Since the 1964 Tokyo Games, when the Olympics were telecast live for the first time, they have become the most global sporting event in the world. Gathering together athletes and sport officials from over 200 countries as well as global corporations, the Olympic broadcast now attracts an audience of billions. Yet despite these globalizing features, the Olympics, with its televised flag-raising and national anthems for the winners, actually serves to reinforce the political and cultural distinctiveness of individual nation-states.

Every four years, during two weeks and a half, the entire world –figuratively speaking– takes a breather to see and learn about high-performance athletes competing with the best-of-the best, in search of new olympic –and world– records setting and all sort of sports feats.

As mentioned in our previous post (Globalization & the Olympics (Part I), the Olympics, as well as sports in general, are a zero-sum-game. In contrast, and most fortunately, the globalization phenomena is not. Thus, in the globalization socio-economic phenomena at large, the possibilities are virtually unlimited. This rarely recognized, virtuous characteristic of globalization has to do with the fact that global society’s unsatisfied needs, by themselves signal the right course of action to follow. The signals of the road to follow are of a very varied nature, being the price mechanism one of the most important ones.

During this break in the action between the closing of the Olympic Games and the opening of the Paralympic Games in London this Friday, we have a unique opportunity to consider how both events can improve people’s lives and impact the world.

This Olympic partner program provides a list of sponsors of the games.

As social-savvy marketers have quickly learned, the U.S. Olympic Committee has ironclad regulations, backed by U.S. trademark law, that restrain nonsponsoring brands from saying anything even vaguely evocative of the Olympics. A casual mention of Rio on Facebook? A congratulatory tweet to a gold medalist? Even tweeting the term "gold medal"? Don't do it.