The Winter Olympics began as a sports week in a French mountain town that nobody thought to call the Olympics. A century later they still turn on weather, nerve and equipment: an army hauling snow by the truckload, a warm wind stopping a race, granite quarried from one small island. These stories follow the hosts, the athletes, the sports and the moments that stuck.
Every tile in a Winter Olympics game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Host Cities
nine stories
1A warm wind stopped the races
On the tile: St. Moritz1928
St. Moritz built almost nothing for 1928. The resort already had its bobsled and skeleton runs, its rinks and its mountains, so the Swiss added little more than a ski jump. What they could not arrange was the weather. On the morning of the 50 kilometer cross-country race the temperature sat near freezing; by midday a warm Alpine wind called the Foehn had pushed it to about 25 degrees Celsius, ruining the snow and the wax. The 10,000 meter speed skating race was halted partway through and never restarted.
The man who brought the Winter Olympics to a small village in upstate New York was Godfrey Dewey, whose father Melvil Dewey devised the Dewey Decimal System and helped found the Lake Placid Club. Godfrey pitched the idea to the local Kiwanis Club in March 1928, the Chamber of Commerce guaranteed a fifty thousand dollar bond, and the IOC awarded the Games in April 1929. Lake Placid then had no bobsled run at all. New York's governor, Franklin Roosevelt, signed the bill that authorized one.
The summer flame comes from Olympia in Greece. When Oslo held the first torch relay for a Winter Games in 1952, its flame came instead from a hearth: the fireplace of the house in Morgedal where Sondre Norheim, the pioneer of modern skiing, was born. Skiers carried it by relay into Bislett Stadium, where the cauldron was lit by Eigil Nansen, grandson of the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen. A princess opened those Games because the King and the Crown Prince were in London for the funeral of King George VI.
When the 1960 Games were awarded to Squaw Valley, California, the site held a single hotel. The organizers polled the winter nations, found that only nine would enter a bobsled team, and decided not to build a run at all. Bobsledding, on the program since the first Winter Games, simply did not happen that year. Its federation protested to the IOC, lost, and staged a world championship in Cortina two weeks later instead. Walt Disney, meanwhile, was put in charge of the ceremonies.
Innsbruck had everything a host could want in 1964 except snow. A warm Foehn wind wrecked the ski courses, so the Austrian army hauled tens of thousands of cubic meters of snow to the runs, and soldiers carted bricks of ice down from the Alpine peaks to line the bobsled and luge tracks. When rain struck ten days before the opening ceremony, the army packed the slopes down by hand and foot. The Games went ahead, and over a million spectators came.
Denver won the 1976 Winter Games in May 1970 and then gave them back. Coloradans worried about the cost and about what building the venues would do to the environment, and in November 1972 a statewide referendum went against the Olympics. With barely three years left, the IOC turned to Innsbruck, host in 1964, over hurried bids from Lake Placid, Mont Blanc and Tampere. The retiring IOC president, Avery Brundage, had said he hoped "the Winter Olympics receive a decent burial in Denver." Innsbruck saved them instead.
By the mid-1970s the Winter Olympics were hard to give away. Costs had frightened cities off, and when the IOC met in Vienna in October 1974 the only other serious candidate had already withdrawn, so Lake Placid was chosen by acclamation. The village promised a smaller, simpler Games, then found out what television and a few million visitors do to a town that size. Transportation and communication struggled, and the IOC resolved never again to send the Games somewhere so small.
Nagano was an upset choice over Salt Lake City and Oestersund, and it brought the Winter Games back to Asia for the first time since Sapporo in 1972. Then the weather took charge. Snow, rain and fog knocked the men's downhill, the showpiece of any Winter Olympics, off the calendar four separate times, and by the second week organizers were wondering whether the alpine program could finish before the closing ceremony. One run of the four-man bobsled was dropped altogether.
One city has held both halves of the Olympic calendar. Beijing opened the Summer Games on August 8, 2008, and on February 4, 2022, the same city opened the Winter Games, the first host in Olympic history to stage both seasons. Both opening ceremonies were held in the same arena, the National Stadium known as the Bird's Nest. No other city had managed the double in the ninety-eight years since the winter program began at Chamonix, and the two Beijing Games were fourteen years apart.
Sonja Henie went to the first Winter Olympics as an eleven-year-old and finished last of the eight women in the field. A few weeks later she was fifth at the world championships, and two years after that she was runner-up. Then she won the world title ten years running and took Olympic gold in 1928, 1932 and 1936. She turned professional in 1936, made ten Hollywood features, and left figure skating far more popular than she found it.
Anders Haugen, a Norwegian-born American, placed fourth in the ski jump at Chamonix in 1924 and went home with nothing. Fifty years later, at a reunion of the 1924 Norwegian team, the sports historian Jacob Vaage checked the arithmetic and found the third-place total had been added wrong: 17.821 points, not the 18.000 credited. In Oslo on September 12, 1974, the bronze medal was presented to the eighty-five-year-old Haugen by the daughter of the man who had been given it.
Eddie Eagan won the light heavyweight boxing gold at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics. Twelve years later, at thirty-four, he climbed into a four-man bobsled at Lake Placid, having taken up the sport roughly three weeks earlier, and won gold in that as well. It was his first and only bobsled competition. He remains the only person to have won gold medals in different sports at both a Summer and a Winter Olympic Games.
Jacob Tullin Thams won the ski jump at Chamonix in 1924. Four years later he lay third after one jump, and when Swiss rivals accused the Norwegians of cowardice, he passed up a safe jump for a medal and gave it everything. He flew 73 meters, nearly ten beyond any other jump, could not stay upright on landing, and finished twenty-eighth. Thams later turned to sailing, and at Berlin in 1936 he won silver in the eight-meter class, the second person after Eddie Eagan to win medals at both a Winter and a Summer Games in different sports.
Eric Heiden entered five speed skating races at Lake Placid in 1980, from the 500 meters to the 10,000, and won all five. Predictions before the Games had him taking five golds, though few believed he would actually win them all. He finished in the 10,000 with a world record, six seconds under the old mark. Through 2022 only Vitaly Scherbo in gymnastics and Michael Phelps in swimming had matched five individual golds at a single Olympics.
Women's speed skating joined the Olympic program at Squaw Valley in 1960, and Lidiya Skoblikova of the Soviet Union won two of its four races. At Innsbruck in 1964 she entered all four and won every one of them inside four days, one of the great performances in Winter Olympic history. She was not the only Soviet woman to sweep her events that year: in cross-country skiing, Klavdiya Boyarskikh won all three women's races. The Soviet men, meanwhile, won the ice hockey title easily.
In February 1988 Christa Rothenburger-Luding won the 1,000 meter speed skating gold at Calgary and a silver in the 500. Seven months later she rode the match sprint at the Seoul Summer Olympics and came away with another silver, the first woman to win medals at both a Winter and a Summer Games in different sports. She was a world champion in both: the speed skating sprint title in 1985 and 1988, and cycling's sprint in 1986. Now that the Summer and Winter Games no longer share a year, her same-year double cannot be repeated.
Marit Bjorgen's first Olympic medal was a relay silver in 2002; her last came sixteen years later at Pyeongchang. In between the Norwegian cross-country skier collected eight golds, four silvers and three bronzes, fifteen medals across five Winter Games. Her nickname was the Iron Lady. At Vancouver in 2010 alone she entered five races and came away with a medal from every one of them: three golds, a silver and a bronze.
Vonetta Flowers was a sprinter and long jumper at the University of Alabama at Birmingham before she ever saw a bobsled. At Salt Lake City in 2002 she was the brakeman, pushing the sled that Jill Bakken drove, and the two won the first women's Olympic bobsled event ever held. Flowers became the first Black athlete to win a gold medal at a Winter Olympics. She came back in 2006 with a different driver and finished sixth.
Every curling stone at the 2026 Olympics came from one small uninhabited island. Ailsa Craig, a volcanic plug in the Firth of Clyde formed about sixty million years ago, yields two granites that do different jobs. Blue Hone, essentially waterproof, forms the running band that touches the ice; Common Green resists impact without splintering, so it makes up the body. The Scottish firm Kays made 132 new stones for the 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It was not always so: Turin in 2006 was the first Olympics whose stones were cut entirely from Ailsa Craig granite.
Skeleton was for decades a St. Moritz specialty, raced on the town's famous Cresta Run, and for most of a century it appeared at the Olympics only when St. Moritz was hosting: 1928 and 1948, then nothing until Salt Lake City in 2002. Even the name is unsettled. One account traces it to a metal sled built in 1892 that looked like a skeleton; another says it is an English mangling of kjaelke, a Norwegian word for a sled.
Bobsled takes its name from a habit. When steel sleds replaced wooden ones, crews bobbed back and forth along the straightaways in the belief that it added speed, and the sleds became known as bobsleds. The first bobsleigh club opened at St. Moritz in 1897, the international federation was founded in 1923, and a four-man race appeared on the program at the first Winter Olympics the following year. The two-man event joined at Lake Placid in 1932.
Snowboarding reached the Olympics at Nagano in 1998 with four events: halfpipe and giant slalom, for men and for women. It arrived in the same week as women's ice hockey and a returning curling tournament. The program has grown a good deal since: at the 2026 Games the snowboard schedule ran to eleven events, including slopestyle, big air, snowboard cross and a mixed team race that did not exist when the sport first turned up.
Men's ice hockey has been an Olympic sport since the Antwerp Games of 1920, four years before a Winter Olympics existed. The women's tournament did not arrive until Nagano in 1998, seventy-eight years later. Canada came in as the favorite and the United States won the final, taking the first gold medal awarded in women's Olympic hockey. The same Games introduced snowboarding and brought curling back to the program.
Winter sports were Olympic before the Winter Olympics existed. Figure skating was contested at the London Games of 1908 and again at Antwerp in 1920, where an ice hockey tournament was also held, all of it inside what we now call the Summer Games. When the winter program opened at Chamonix in 1924, Gillis Grafstrom of Sweden defended a figure skating title he had won at a summer Olympics, which is how one skater came to hold both.
The three sliding sports reached the Olympics in stages. A four-man bobsled race was on the program at the very first Winter Games in 1924. Skeleton followed at St. Moritz in 1928, though for decades afterward it was a rare visitor. Luge came last of the three, making its debut at Innsbruck in 1964, forty years after the first Olympic bobsled race, with singles races for men and women and a doubles event, all held on the bobsled track at Igls.
Alpine skiing had to argue its way onto the program. The Scandinavian countries, whose skiing ran to distance and jumping, had resisted alpine events and were finally overruled for the 1936 Games at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Even then there was a single event for men and one for women, the combined, which merged a downhill and a slalom into one result. Separate downhill and slalom races waited until St. Moritz in 1948. Nordic skiing, meanwhile, had been Olympic since the beginning in 1924.
Cross-country skiing was on the Olympic program from the beginning in 1924, but only for men. Women raced Olympic cross-country for the first time at Oslo in 1952, twenty-eight years later, and the same Games added giant slalom races for men and for women. Otherwise the program changed only a little. At Holmenkollen the Norwegians renovated their famous ski jump, tucked a restaurant and shops underneath the take-off ramp, and made room for 130,000 people to watch.
The Miracle on Ice is remembered as the game that won the 1980 Olympics, but it did not decide the gold medal. Shortly before the Games the Soviet team had beaten the United States 10-3 in an exhibition at Madison Square Garden. At Lake Placid the score was level in the third period when the American captain Mike Eruzione made it 4-3, and as the final seconds ran out the ABC announcer Al Michaels asked, "Do you believe in miracles?" The Americans still had to beat Finland two days later.
At Innsbruck in 1964 the British two-man crew of Tony Nash and Robin Dixon broke a bolt on their sled before the final run. Eugenio Monti, the Italian driver trailing them in the standings, took the bolt off his own sled and lent it to them. Nash and Dixon won the gold medal. Monti took bronze and was given the International Fair Play Award, and had to wait until 1968, at forty, for an Olympic title of his own.
On Valentine's Day 1984 Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean skated their free dance to Ravel's Bolero in Sarajevo and received a six for artistic impression from all nine judges, the most a judge could award. Twelve of their eighteen marks were sixes. About twenty-four million people watched at home in Britain, and in the Zetra arena the crowd rose to its feet as bouquets of flowers rained onto the ice. The Soviet pair Natalya Bestemianova and Andrei Bukin took the silver medal.
Steven Bradbury was well off the pace in the 1,000 meter short track final at Salt Lake City in 2002 when the four skaters ahead of him tangled and went down at the final bend. He came through the wreckage and across the line first, giving Australia its first Winter Olympic gold medal. It was not all luck. Crashes and a disqualification had cleared his path in earlier rounds, and the four-time Olympian had gone in intending to hang back and let the leaders falter.
Eddie Edwards was a plasterer from Cheltenham who paid his own way in ski jumping and arrived at Calgary in 1988 as the best jumper Britain had. Fans met him at the airport with a banner reading "Welcome to Calgary, Eddie The Eagle," and the name stuck for life. He finished last on both hills. He also set British records on both, which says something about where British ski jumping stood at the time.
Hermann Maier trained as a bricklayer and did not reach the World Cup circuit until he was twenty-three, late for an alpine racer. At Nagano in 1998 he crashed in the downhill in a fall that looked far worse than it turned out to be, and walked away from it. A few days later he won the super-G, and then the giant slalom as well, leaving the Games with two gold medals and a nickname that outlasted his career.
Canada had hosted the Olympics twice before 2010, at Montreal in 1976 and Calgary in 1988, and had not won a gold medal at either. On the second full day of the Vancouver Games the moguls skier Alexandre Bilodeau beat the defending champion, Dale Begg-Smith of Australia, and ended the streak as the first Canadian to win gold on home ground. Four years later at Sochi he won the moguls again.
Dan Jansen was among the fastest sprinters ever to skate, and the Olympics kept going wrong for him. On the morning of the 500 meters at Calgary in 1988, his sister Jane died of leukemia. He fell in that race, then fell again in the 1,000 a few days later. At Lillehammer in 1994 he put a hand down on the last turn of the 500 and came eighth. Then he won the 1,000 in world record time, and on his victory lap he carried his young daughter, named Jane in honor of her aunt.
When Sarajevo opened the 1984 Games, Yugoslavia had never won a medal at a Winter Olympics. Jure Franko, the host country's flagbearer, stood fourth after the first run of the giant slalom, then won the second run outright to finish behind Max Julen of Switzerland. That silver was the first winter medal in the country's history. It was the high point of Franko's career; he finished the season nineteenth overall and retired the following year.