 government; the country's economic crisis; health and safety concerns surrounding the Zika virus and significant pollution in the Guanabara Bay; and a state-sponsored doping scandal involving Russia, which affected the participation of its athletes in the Games. Tokyo, Japan will host the 2020 Summer Olympics, making it the first Asian city to host the Olympic Games twice.
Forty-two sports, spanning 55 disciplines, have been part of the Olympic program at one point or another. Twenty-eight sports have comprised the schedule for three of the recent games, 2000, 2004, and 2008 Summer Olympics. Due to the removal of baseball and softball, there was a total of twenty-six sports in the 2012 Games.
The various Olympic Sports federations are grouped under a common umbrella association, called the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF).
For individual sports, competitors typically qualify by attaining a certain place in a major international event or on the IF's ranking list. There is a general rule that a maximum of three individual athletes may represent each nation per competition. National Olympic Committees (NOCs) may enter a limited number of qualified competitors in each event, and the NOC decides which qualified competitors to select as representatives in each event if more have attained the benchmark than can be entered.
Nations most often qualify teams for team sports through continental qualifying tournaments, in which each continental association is given a certain number of spots in the Olympic tournament. Each nation may be represented by no more than one team per competition; a team consists of just two people in some sports.
Summer Olympic sports are divided into five categories (A – E) based on popularity, gauged by six criteria: television viewing figures (40%), internet popularity (20%), public surveys (15%), ticket requests (10%), press coverage (10%), and number of national federations (5%). The category of a sport determines the share of Olympic revenue received by that sport's International Federation. Sports that were new to the 2016 Olympics (rugby and golf) have been placed in Category E.
The current categories are:
|A||3||athletics, aquatics, gymnastics|
|B||5||basketball, cycling, football, tennis, volleyball|
|C||8||archery, badminton, boxing, judo, rowing, shooting, table tennis, weightlifting|
|D||9||canoe/kayaking, equestrian, fencing, handball, field hockey, sailing, taekwondo, triathlon, wrestling|
|E||3||modern pentathlon, golf, rugby|
|1||United States (USA)||27||1022||795||705||2522|
|2||Soviet Union (URS)||9||395||319||296||1010|
|3||Great Britain (GBR)||28||263||295||289||847|
|9||East Germany (GDR)||5||153||129||127||409|
|No.||Year||Host||Opened by||Dates||Nations||Competitors||Sports||Disciplines||Events||Top nation||Ref|
|I||1896||Athens, Greece||King George I||6–15 April||14||241||241||0||9||10||43||United States (USA)|||
|II||1900||Paris, France||N/A||14 May – 28 October||24||997||975||22||19||20||85A[›]||France (FRA)|||
|III||1904||St. Louis, United States||Former Governor David R. Francis||1 July – 23 November||12||651||645||6||16||17||94B[›]||United States (USA)|||
|IV||1908||London, United Kingdom||King Edward VII||27 April – 31 October||22||2008||1971||37||22||25||110||Great Britain (GBR)|||
|V||1912||Stockholm, Sweden||King Gustaf V||6–22 July||28||2407||2359||48||14||18||102||United States (USA)|||
|VI||1916||Awarded to Berlin|
Cancelled due to World War I
|VII||1920||Antwerp, Belgium||King Albert I||14 August – 12 September||29||2626||2561||65||22||29||156C[›]||United States (USA)|||
|VIII||1924||Paris, France||President Gaston Doumergue||4 May – 27 July||44||3089||2954||135||17||23||126||United States (USA)|||
|IX||1928||Amsterdam, Netherlands||Prince Henry, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin||28 July – 12 August||46||2883||2606||277||14||20||109||United States (USA)|||
|X||1932||Los Angeles, United States||Vice President Charles Curtis||30 July – 14 August||37||1332||1206||126||14||20||117||United States (USA)|||
|XI||1936||Berlin, Germany||Chancellor Ado