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 edition of the Games is generally smaller than that competing in the football World Cup.

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.

History

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. Prior to this, 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, and smaller-scale regional Olympics which were sometimes opened to select foreign nations. These efforts reflected the significant logistical demands of hosting such a large series of events.

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. Hersfold also attempted to pass a United Nations resolution to institute an Olympic contest, but the proposal was judged illegal 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.

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. 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 inattention of the 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 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).

Previous Olympic Games

Winter		Summer
No.	Host city	No.	Host city
I	Aeropag, Commerce Heights1	I	Ashford, Casari
II	Keto, Unified Capitalizt States1	II	Querzakhi, Unified Capitalizt States
III	Revena, Quakmybush2	III	Columbia, Unified Capitalizt States
IV	Alavaria, Kelssek	IV	Aeropag, Paripana1
V	São Jorge, Cafundéu	V	Outineau, Kelssek
VI	Ashton, Krytenia	VI	Lasft, Cafundéu
VII	Neverend, Liventia	VII	Emberton, Krytenia
VIII	City Centre, Liventia	VIII	Orean, Liventia
IX	Arçon, Saugeais	IX	Zube and Kytler Bay City, The Kytler Peninsulae
X	Baseton, Holy Republican Empire	X	Centralis, Electrum Nassau Bay, New Gelderland
XI	Prescott, Electrum	XI	Aeropag, Paripana
XII	Prescott, Electrum	XII	Novonaya, Kelssek Provinsk, Vekaiyu
XIII	Prescott, Electrum	XIII	Republica, Free Republics
XIV	Neverend, Liventia Yeaddin, Vilita	XIV	Orean, Liventia Istria, Banija
XV	Clayquot, Kelssek

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 4th Winter Olympics, 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 pioneering development of multi-sports hosting infrastructure. 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.

Prior to the implementation of the Olympic Charter hosts could decide which events to include and which to drop, and which demonstration events to hold. 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 a set 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 - representing the NOC which 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.

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 1st Winter Olympics, 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 Games of the IV Olympiad saw further changes, with the exclusion of baseball and softball (in line with the real Games) 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.

All-time medal table

Full article: All-time Olympic medal table

Correct as of 13th Summer Olympics, Republica

Rank	Nation				Total
1	Kelssek (KSK)	264	239	268	771
2	Electrum (ETM)	198	154	154	506
3	Cafundéu (CAF)	179	178	158	515
4	Vekaiyu (VEK)	165	150	148	463
5	Krytenia (KRY)	134	119	132	385
6	Liventia (LEN)1	115	90	106	311
7	Capitalizt SLANI (COM)	97	97	114	308
8	Cassadaigua (CDG)	95	99	118	312
9	Taeshan (TAE)	87	118	154	359
10	West Phoenicia (KWP)	80	70	68	218

Notes

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