Olympic Games about 10,500 competitors from 204 nations at the 2012 Summer Olympics. The scope and scale of the Winter Olympics is smaller. For example, Sochi hosted 2,873 athletes from 88 nations competing in 98 events during the 2014 Winter Olympics. During the Games most athletes and officials are housed in the Olympic Village. This village is intended to be a self-contained home for all the Olympic participants, and is furnished with cafeterias, health clinics, and locations for religious expression. The IOC allowed the formation of National Olympic Committees representing nations that did not meet the strict requirements for political sovereignty that
Winter Olympic Games competition at the age of 15. She became the youngest Olympic champion in history, a distinction she held for 70 years. The next Winter Olympics held in Lake Placid, New York, was the first to be hosted outside of Europe. Seventeen nations and 252 athletes participated. This was less than in 1928, as the journey to Lake Placid, United States, was long and expensive for most competitors, who had little money in the midst of the Great Depression. The athletes competed in fourteen events in four sports. Virtually no snow fell for two months before the Games, and there was