Cabriolet - Brian Jessel BMW

A Vancouverites
Guide to the 2010
Winter Olympics
By Rachel Black
The Winter Olympics are coming to our beautiful city. How do you
intend to survive the arrival of the world at our doorstep while
making the most of this once-in-a-lifetime event? This is a short
guide to help you navigate Vancouver and the Olympics from
February 12-28, 2010, starting with a brief history of how this
event came to be.
How did it all get started?
As you can imagine the Winter Olympics have not been around for nearly as long as their
summer counterpart. There just wasn’t enough snow for winter sports in Greece, but that is
ancient history. The modern Olympic Games were founded in 1894 by Pierre Fredi, who
wanted to promote international cooperation and understanding through sporting
competition. The first modern Games were held in Athens, Greece in 1896. Leading up to the
creation of a separate games for winter sports, hockey and figure skating were included as
part of the Summer Games. In 1908, figure skating made its debut as an event at the Summer
Olympics in London. It’s interesting to note that hockey and figure skating remain two of the
hottest tickets in the Games. The other winter sports had to wait a little longer to claim a
place in the limelight: it wasn’t until 1924 that the inaugural winter games were held in
Chamonix, France. First called the “International Winter Sports Weeks” (although the week
actually lasted eleven days), it wasn’t until later that this event was called the “Winter
Olympic Games”. It was such a success, with over two hundred athletes from sixteen nations
competing in sixteen events, that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to
schedule the second Winter Olympics Games in St. Moritz in 1928.