Winter Olympics is a major international sporting event that occurs once every four years. Unlike the Summer Olympics, the Winter Olympics feature sports practiced on snow and ice. The first Winter Olympics, the 1924 Winter Olympics, was held in Chamonix, France.
The original five sports (broken into nine disciplines) were bobsleigh, curling, ice hockey, Nordic skiing, and skating.
The Games were held every four years from 1924 until 1936, after which they were interrupted by World War II. The Olympics resumed in 1948 and was again held every four years. Until 1992, the Winter and Summer Olympic Games were held in the same years, but in accordance with a 1986 decision by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to place the Summer and Winter Games on separate four-year cycles in alternating even-numbered years, the next Winter Olympics after 1992 was in 1994.
Sports and disciplines have been added and some of them, such as Alpine skiing, luge, short track speed skating, freestyle skiing, skeleton, and snowboarding, have earned a permanent spot on the Olympic program. Others (such as curling and bobsleigh) have been discontinued and later reintroduced, or have been permanently discontinued (such as military patrol, though the modern Winter Olympic sport of biathlon is descended from it).
Still others, such as speed skiing, bandy and skijoring, were demonstration sports but never incorporated as Olympic sports. The rise of television as a global medium for communication enhanced the profile of the Games. It created an income stream, via the sale of broadcast rights and advertising, which has become lucrative for the IOC. This allowed outside interests, such as television companies and corporate sponsors, to exert influence. The IOC has had to address several criticisms, internal scandals, the use of performance-enhancing drugs by Winter Olympians, as well as a political boycott of the Winter Olympics. Nations have used the Winter Games to showcase the claimed superiority of their political systems.
The Winter Olympics has been hosted on three continents by eleven different countries. The Games have been held in the United States four times (1932, 1960, 1980, 2002); in France three times (1924, 1968, 1992); and in Austria (1964, 1976), Canada (1988, 2010), Japan (1972, 1998), Italy (1956, 2006), Norway (1952, 1994), and Switzerland (1928, 1948) twice. Also, the Games have been held in Germany (1936), Yugoslavia (1984), and Russia (2014) once. The IOC has selected Pyeongchang, South Korea, to host the 2018 Winter Olympics and Beijing, China, to host the 2022 Winter Olympics.
