Olympic Games

The Olympic Games is a series of international sporting events that is open to all nations to compete in. The overall number of individual athletes and events makes the Summer Olympics (formally referred to as the Games of the Olympiad) the largest sporting event in the world, although the number of nations participating in each Olympics is generally smaller than that competing in the football World Cup. While considerably smaller, the Winter Olympics (formally the Olympic Winter Games) is also similar or larger in scale than the biggest international tournaments.

The Olympic Charter sets out the governance of the Olympics, most importantly the composition of the Olympic Council, procedures for voting on host cities, and the lists of medal events. The charter also sets out that the Summer and Winter Olympics must alternate. Both are held once per OOC year, usually in the northern hemisphere summer and winter respectively.

History
Various regions of the multiverse have hosted regional Olympics, sometimes opening them up to foreign nations, but none have approached the scale of the NationStates Olympics, which are conducted on the game's main forums. The first Olympic Games to be successfully completed was the 1st Winter Olympics in Aeropag, Paripana, a region that has since hosted five more editions of both Summer and Winter Games. Compared to competitions in other sports, such as football and ice hockey, the Olympics were quite late in being adopted by the sports roleplayers, only beginning in 2006. For several years beforehand there had been attempts to organize a multi-sport event patterned after the real-world summer Olympics, such as Kaza '08 which was incompletely scorinated and abandoned. These efforts reflected the significant demands of developing a means to scorinate, and then overseeing the hosting of such a large series of events.

There were some historical antecedents to the first NS Olympics, though. The largest successful multi-sport event to that point had been organized by Casari, in the form of the Tyrellian Ylompic Games, which had a summer sports focus. The NS United Nations had also attempted to pass a resolution to institute an Olympic contest: the proposal was deleted, however, and came to be regarded as an interesting and historic moment in the evolution of the Enodian proposal rules, becoming the inspiration for the revised committee rules in the Hackian Laws. The inspiration for Hersfold's proposal was probably the RL 2004 Summer Olympics, and similarly the First Winter Olympics finally did come about in the wake of the RL 2006 Winter Olympics.

Long before any Olympic Games were organized, an Olympic Council was founded. This prompted great excitement but not a great deal of actual organization, and it took months before they would have any bids to vote on. The Olympic Council subsequently went into decline and was, for several years, totally defunct, in comparison with the relatively resilient World Cup Committee. Several factors contributed to this: the infrequency of the Olympics compared with other sports events; the complexity of hosting the Olympics and the consequent self-selection of hosts; and the inactivity of original members. For example, only four nations from the 1st Winter Olympics returned for the 4th Winter Olympics.

Olympic Charter
The dormant Olympic Council was revived by the ratification of an Olympic Charter in January 2010 (at the same vote in which the 5th Winter Olympics host was decided), which established a new set of formalised rules for running the Olympics and selecting hosts. The membership of the Olympic Council is made up of all nations which took part in the immediately previous Winter or Summer Olympics; nations lose membership if they entirely miss an Olympic cycle but can regain membership if they make a valid entry for the Olympics again. This new regime's first formal act was to hold a vote ratifying a host for the 5th Summer Olympics; its host selection process has now been used for all subsequent editions of the Olympic Games (see below).

Olympic host cities

 * 1) The Unified Capitalizt States, previously known as Commerce Heights, was a political unit within Paripana; in this context, these three terms all essentially refer to the same area.
 * 2) The III Olympic Winter Games in Revena, Quakmybush were abandoned prior to completion. Olympic records set in Revena are not considered official.

Olympic hosts
Any nation can bid to host the Olympics, and nations from around the world come to compete. Despite this, hosting duties have historically been almost monopolised by Atlantian Oceania, a region with a strong history of involvement in sports roleplaying. Indeed, until the fourth Olympic cycle, no Games had ever been held outside this region: Alavaria, Kelssek, host of the IV Olympic Winter Games, is located in The East Pacific. This statistic is somewhat skewed by the fact that five of the eight Games up to that point were held in Paripana, owing to their proven record of reliable hosting and development of the xkoranate multi-event scorinator. The historic significance of Paripana to the NS Olympics was honoured at the Alavaria Games by the ceremonial firing of a cannon during the opening ceremony.

Hosting can be extremely time consuming, far more so than most other sporting events. Sign-ups typically open weeks in advance to allow sufficient time to register all entrants, and the generation and posting of results can take several hours, and is typically split up into two separate scorinations per day ("afternoon" and "evening", for RP purposes). xkoranate has become the standard means of simulating results for the last few Olympics, subject to periodic updates and occasional additions of new sports. At the same time, Olympic hosts are generally afforded more generous prerogatives than those of, for example, the World Cup: prior to the implementation of the Olympic Charter they could decide which events to include and which to drop, and which demonstration events to hold, limited by the general convention of staying close to the real-life Olympic programme. This has seen the schedule of events fluctuate slightly over the course of the first few Games. With the ratification of the Olympic Charter prior to the 5th Winter Olympics, adherence to the real-life programme for medal events became a formal requirement, while allowing for minor variations for gender equality and the rationalisation of weight categories in combat sports (see "Sports" below).

Host selection
Under the Olympic Charter rules, bids from any nation can be considered. The president of the Olympic Council - who is the person who last successfully hosted the Summer Olympics - determines which bids meet the technical requirements (for instance, specifying an appropriate scorinator) and when satisfied that no further bids are forthcoming administers a vote of the members of the Olympic Council (all players who have participated in the previous Summer or Winter Olympics, plus any players appointed to the executive committee under the Charter). Votes will include the option to re-open bids, and are decided by the option which wins the most votes. In the case of a tie, the option which received the majority of the executive committee members' votes wins. The president holds the final tie-breaking vote if the vote among executive committee members is still tied.

Before being formalised by the Olympic Charter, the method of electing of a host city varied from case-to-case. Initially, the Olympic Council controlled the process, setting deadlines for bid submissions, rejecting bids that were technically incompetent (a task assigned to an Olympic Upper Council, selected largely by reputation), and then organizing a vote (with each National Olympic Committee being permitted one vote). Over time, the Olympic Council's influence greatly diminished, and it became increasingly clear that the demands of hosting were so great that very few nations could realistically be expected to perform them. Paripana, Quakmybush, and Kelssek therefore took on hosting duties by default, in the absence of any competing bids and with no objection expected. By the time of the 4th Summer Olympics, the process regained a degree of formality, although the Olympic Council as such still played no part. The host selection process was overseen by the Kelssek Olympic Committee, and featured a vote open to NOCs which had participated in at least one of the previous two Olympic Games. This process was repeated to select a host for the 5th Winter Olympics, at which point the ratification of the Olympic Charter meant that future votes have followed a more formal process.

Scorination
Every Olympics since the 2nd Summer Olympics has used xkoranate as the primary scorinator. For the 1st Summer Olympics, Casari used a set of spreadsheets, which were based on current world records at the time. This has led to many of the results being considered unofficial as it generated results differently from xkoranate. For the 1st and 2nd Winter Olympics, Commerce Heights used an earlier version of xkoranate, a PHP/SQL based program with a command-line interface.

Participation
All athletes are entered into the Games as part of a delegation. Almost always, each delegation is submitted by an organization known as an Olympic committee, which is assigned its own three-letter code for recordkeeping purposes. However, a delegation may combine entrants from more than one Olympic committee. Seven national Olympic committees from the Teremara region combine their entrants into a single delegation, the Tereman Unified Team, while being identified by their respective nations in competition and in record-keeping. In other situations, certain nations have competed both separately and as part of the same delegation, for example Vilita and Turori.

Olympic committees are often called NOCs (National Olympic Committees) for short, given that most but not all Olympic committees represent nation-states. A significant number of Olympic committees are exceptions to this, most notably those representing the stateless geographic region of Paripana (Paripana Sporting Council, Jasi'yun, Association francophone).

As of the eighth Olympic cycle, it was estimated that at least 193 National Olympic Committees had sent delegations to at least one Olympic event, though none have sent delegations to every Games; Qazox was previously the only nation to have participated in every Olympics, but did not enter the 9th Summer Olympics.

Sports
Though the programme of events contested has always been based on the real-life Olympic Games, the list of summer sports has changed subtly over time, reflecting additions and removals from the hosts of each Games as well as changes to the real-life programme. From the 5th Summer Olympics (Outineau) onwards, the Olympic Charter was enacted, formally requiring that only events contested in the real-life Olympics may be held as medal events, and hosts are required to follow the full programme with the exception that the number of weight categories for combat sports may be reduced and that where the real Olympics has an event in one gender but not another, the event may also be held in the corresponding gender (examples include men's synchronized swimming and women's ski jumping). These are specifically identified on the "base list" which must be held, and the "extended list" which hosts have the discretion to include or exclude. Events not on those lists cannot be held as medal events.

The Summer Olympics also sometimes include several demonstration sports, while only snow-angel making, bandy and winter pentathlon (devised by the Liventian organizing committee of the 7th Winter Olympics) have been contested as demonstration events at the winter edition. The Winter Olympic programme has always consisted of fifteen official disciplines in seven sports. The only variations in the programme during the first eight Games were the exclusion of a women’s 5000 m speed skating event at the I Olympic Winter Games, and the inclusion of skicross at the failed 3rd Winter Olympics. Three additional events were added for the 9th Winter Olympics, reflecting their addition to the real-life programme.

Significant changes in the Summer Olympics programme were made for the 2nd Summer Olympics. These changes included additional events for women (including boxing and cycling), an expansion in the number of events in canoeing and combat sports, and the elimination of cricket and rugby sevens. The 4th Summer Olympics saw further changes, with the removal of baseball and softball (in line with the real Olympics) and a streamlining of gymnastics events so that the real-life apparatus were used, rather than all apparatus being contested by both men and women. Several further changes in line with the RL programme were made for the 8th Summer Olympics. Rugby sevens and golf were contested for the first time as medal events at the 11th Summer Olympics, ahead of their inclusion in the real Games.

Medals
Generally, gold, silver, and bronze medals are awarded to the competitors placing first, second, and third respectively according to the rules for each event. The winners are further awarded the title of Olympic champion. In combat sports two bronze medals are awarded in each event. For judo, taekwondo, and wrestling, they are awarded to the winners of matches between the losing semifinalists and two competitors who won the repêchage after having been eliminated earlier in the tournament. In boxing, there is no repêchage and both losing semi-finalists are awarded bronze medals.

The Olympic Council does not officially recognize nation rankings, as the events are ostensibly competitions between athletes and not nations. However, the publication of medal tallies by country is common in the media. Furthermore, between media outlets there is often variation on whether ranking is based on the number of gold medals or total medals won.

All-time medal table

 * ''Full article: All-time Olympic medal table
 * Correct as of 13th Summer Olympics, Republica''

Notes
 * 1) Does not include the Independent Athletes of Liventia delegation which competed at the 5th Summer Olympics.