11 Facts About Olympic sport

Each Olympic sport is represented by an international governing body, namely an International Federation.

International Olympic Committee establishes a hierarchy of sports, disciplines, and events.

Previous Olympic Games included sports that are no longer included in the current program, such as polo and tug of war.

Example, aquatics is a summer Olympic sport that includes six disciplines: swimming, artistic swimming, diving, water polo, open water swimming, and high diving, since all these disciplines are governed at international level by the International Swimming Federation.

Skating is a winter Olympic sport represented by the International Skating Union, and includes four disciplines: figure skating, speed skating, short track speed skating, and synchronized skating.

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The sport with the largest number of Olympic disciplines is skiing, with six: alpine skiing, cross-country skiing, ski jumping, Nordic combined, snowboarding, and freestyle skiing.

Only summer sports that have never been absent from the Olympic program are athletics, aquatics, cycling, fencing, and gymnastics.

Previous Olympic Games included sports which are no longer present on the current program, like polo and tug of war.

On 21 February 2019, the Paris Organising Committee announced they would propose the inclusion of breakdancing, as well as skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing—three sports which debuted at the then-upcoming 2020 Summer Olympics as optional sports.

On 18 June 2021, the International Olympic Committee issued a proposal for a new winter sport, ski mountaineering, for the 2026 Winter Olympics.

At the 121st IOC Session in Copenhagen on 9 October 2009, the IOC voted to reinstate both golf and rugby to the Olympic program, meaning that the number of sports to be contested in 2016 was 28.