other alpine ski resorts. In 1913, the first international federation of sled sports was founded. Others followed.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is in charge of deciding which sports will be held in each Games. Skateboarding and surfing made the cut in 2020 for the first time. Croquet and tug-of-war are former fixtures that have been discarded. The IOC also happens to be located, since 1915, in Lausanne, Switzerland.
In 1923, a larger and more ambitious organization called the Fédération Internationale de Bobsleigh et de Tobogganing was founded in, you guessed it, Lausanne. They immediately started petitioning to have their sports added to the Winter Olympics, which held its first event in 1924. The four-man bobsled was part of that inaugural Games in Chamonix, France, and has been part of the Winter Olympics ever since—well, except for the 1960 Games, when local officials in Squaw Valley, California, decided it was too expensive to build a bobsled course and so just … didn’t.
Skeleton debuted in 1928, but was dropped until 1948, and then dropped again until 2002. Some sources chalk this up to the danger of the sport, but it seems equally or more likely due to the sport’s limited popularity. The two Games it had been featured in, 1928 and 1948, were both in St. Moritz and used the original Cresta Run, sort of an ode to the town’s contribution to winter sports, but this particular sled sport might have been considered too niche to be featured in Sapporo or Lake Placid or Sarajevo.
By the late 1950s, luge had surpassed skeleton in popularity and had its own organizing group, the Fédération Internationale de Luge de Course. It was scheduled to debut in 1960, but then Squaw Valley again, so it ended up making its first appearance in 1964 in Innsbruck, Austria. The Germans dominated that year.
Luge has been a fixture of the Winter Olympics ever since, and Germany a fixture on the medal podium, having produced nine of the top 10 medal winners. And this year, 2022, is the first Olympic luge without a single competitor from either Switzerland or Great Britain—the countries that, probably, started it all. The Americans and Canadians are there, though.