• The first Winter Olympic Games were held in Chamonix, France in 1924.
  • No country in the Southern Hemisphere has ever hosted a Winter Games.
  • Only four athletes have ever won medals at both the Winter and Summer Olympic Games: Eddie Eagan (United States), Jacob Tullin Thams (Norway), Christa Luding-Rothenburger (East Germany), and Clara Hughes (Canada).
  • The most medals won by any athletes at the Winter Olympic Games is 12 by cross-country skier Bjorn Dählie of Norway.
  • The oldest man to receive a Winter Olympics medal is 83-year-old Anders Haugen. The Norwegian-American actually received his ski jump bronze medal 50 years after he competed in 1924 after a scoring error was discovered in 1974
  • The word “mogul” comes from the Austrian word “mugel,” which means “small hill” or “mound
  • The most medals by an American athles is six by speed skater Bonnie Blair.  Norway has won the most medals at the Winter Olympics.
  • The most unusual Olympic prize awarded was a cow.  American skier and Turin gold medal threat Lindsey Kildow was given a choice by some local dairy farmers between an extra $1200 or a cow for her World Cup win in Val D’Isere, France in 2005. She went with the cow.
  • Legend has it, the Olympic Games were founded by the Roman god Hercules, a son of Zeus.  The first written records were from an event held in 776 BCE.  At this Olympic Games, a naked runner, a cook from Elis, won the sole event – the stade – a run of approximately 690 yards .
  • The ancient Olympic Games grew and continued to be played every four years for nearly 1200 years. In 393 BCE however, the Christian Roman emperor Theodosius I, abolished the Games because of their pagan influences. The winter Olympic Games were first held in 1924, and is always in a different city than the summer Olympic Games. Beginning in 1994, the winter Olympic Games were held every 4 years and in completely different years (two years apart) than the summer Games.
  • The Olympic rings consist of five intertwined rings and represents the unity of the five inhabited continents (considering North and South America as a single continent).  The colored version of the rings—blue, yellow, black, green, and red over a white field forms the Olympic flag. These colors were chosen because every nation had at least one of them on its national flag.
  • The Olympic motto is Citius, Altius, Fortius, a Latin expression meaning “Faster, Higher, Stronger”.
  • Nordic combined is one of three current Olympic Winter Games events in which the United States has never won a medal. (Biathlon and curling are the others.)
  • The Shea Family of Lake Placid, New York, is the first to produce three generations of Olympians. Father Jack, 91, was a double-gold medalist in speed skating, son Jim, Sr., was a U.S. ski team member at the 1964 Innsbruck Games, and in 2002 grandson Jim, Jr., won a gold medal in the skeleton.