Vancouver Olympics 2010

The Vancouver Olympic Games will commence in February, 2010. Vancouver was awarded these Olympic Games after narrowly defeating competing cities Pyeongchang, South Korea and Salzburg, Austria. This will be the second Winter Olympics hosted by Canada and the third Olympics hosted overall. Montreal played host to the 1976 Summer Games and Calgary played host to the 1988 Winter Games.

The Winter Olympics are an international multi-sport event held every four years. They feature sports held on ice or snow. Events including alpine skiing, cross-country skiing, figure skating, ice hockey, Nordic combined, ski jumping, and speed skating have been at every Winter Olympic Games since their inception. Other events such as luge, short track speed skating, bobsled, and freestyle skiing have been added over the years.

The Vancouver Games will be hosted by a number of different venues around Vancouver, British Columbia. The City of Vancouver will host hockey, figure skating, short track skating and some Paralympics events. Whistler, BC will host the alpine skiing, cross country skiing, bobsled and luge events. Richmond will play host to the long track speed skating while West Vancouver will host the freestyle skiing.

The first Winter Olympics were held in Chamonix, France in 1924. Prior to the first proper Winter Olympics, figure skating and ice hockey had included as events in the Summer Olympics. The Games have been held every four years since then with an interruption from 1940-48 due to the Second World War. In 1992, the Winter Games split from the Summer Games schedule in an attempt to attract more advertising money. The next Winter Games on this schedule were the Lillehammer Games in 1992.

There have only been a select number of countries to host the Winter Olympics. As mentioned, this will be Canada's second time to host the Winter Games. Other countries to host the Games twice have been Italy, Japan, Austria and Norway. France has hosted the Games three times while the United States has hosted the Games four times. The next Winter Games will then be hosted by Sochi, Russia in 2014, marking the first time that Russia has hosted a Winter Olympic Games.

In anticipation of the Vancouver Olympics, the Canadian Olympic Association developed a program with the lofty goal of Canadian athletes achieving more Olympic medals than ever before. This program has been called "Own the Podium" and has been in effect over the past number of years. The results of this program will be seen at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.