Difference between revisions of "Olympic Games"

Revision as of 22:33, 23 August 2014

The Olympic Games are a series of international sporting events, open to all nations to compete in. Based heavily on the real world Olympic Games, they have become one of the most eagerly anticipated items on the sports roleplaying calendar. Although the number of nations participating in each edition of the Games has been smaller than that competing in the football World Cup, the overall number of individual athletes and events makes the Summer Olympics the largest sporting event in the world. The Winter Olympics are typically considerably smaller. Oh yeah, we probably should have mentioned: there are two Olympic Games per RL calendar year, one in the Summer for people who run and jump and swim and throw and all that stuff, and one in the Winter for people who ski, skate, snowboard, and generally molest frozen water. Plus the luge, but that's just crazy.

Various regions of the NS World have hosted regional Olympics, sometimes opening them up to foreign nations, but none have approached the scale of the NS Olympics, which are conducted on the game's main forums. The first Olympic Games to be successfully completed was the 1st Winter Olympics in Aeropag, Paripana, a region that has since hosted four more editions of both Summer and Winter Games. Compared to competitions in other sports, such as football and ice hockey, the Olympics were quite late in being adopted by the sports roleplayers, only beginning in 2006. For several years beforehand there had been attempts to organize a multi-sport event patterned after the real-world summer Olympics, such as Kaza '08 which was incompletely scorinated and abandoned. These efforts reflected the significant demands of developing a means to scorinate, and then overseeing the hosting of such a large series of events.

There were some historical antecedents to the first NS Olympics, though. The largest successful multi-sport event to that point had been organized by Casari, in the form of the Tyrellian Ylompic Games, which had a summer sports focus. The NS United Nations had also attempted to pass a resolution to institute an Olympic contest: the proposal was deleted, however, and came to be regarded as an interesting and historic moment in the evolution of the Enodian proposal rules, becoming the inspiration for the revised committee rules in the Hackian Laws. The inspiration for Hersfold's proposal was probably the RL 2004 Summer Olympics, and similarly the First Winter Olympics finally did come about in the wake of the RL 2006 Winter Olympics.

Long before any Olympic Games were organized, an Olympic Council was founded. This prompted great excitement but not a great deal of actual organization, and it took months before they would have any bids to vote on. The Olympic Council subsequently went into decline and was, for several years, totally defunct, in comparison with the relatively resilient World Cup Committee. Several factors contributed to this: the infrequency of the Olympics compared with other sports events; the complexity of hosting the Olympics and the consequent self-selection of hosts; and the inactivity of original members. For example, only four nations from the First Winter Olympics returned for the 4th Winter Olympics. The Olympic Council has now been revived by the ratification of an Olympic Charter in January 2010, which established a new set of formalised rules for running the Olympics and selecting hosts. This new regime's first formal act was to hold a vote ratifying a host for the 5th Summer Olympics, and so far it appears to be going swimmingly.

Olympic hosts

Any nation can bid to host the Olympics, and nations from around the world come to compete. Despite this, hosting duties have historically been almost monopolised by Atlantian Oceania, a region with a strong history of involvement in sports roleplaying. Indeed, until the fourth Olympic cycle, no Games had ever been held outside this region: Alavaria, Kelssek, host of the Fourth Winter Olympics, is located in The East Pacific. This statistic is somewhat skewed by the fact that five of the eight Games up to that point were held in Paripana, owing to their proven record of reliable hosting and development of the xkoranate multi-event scorinator. The historic significance of Paripana to the NS Olympics was honoured at the Alavaria Games by the ceremonial firing of a cannon during the opening ceremony.

The method of selecting a host has varied over time. Initially, the Olympic Council controlled the process, setting deadlines for bid submissions, rejecting bids that were technically incompetent (a task assigned to an Olympic Upper Council, selected largely by reputation), and then organizing a vote (with each National Olympic Committee being permitted one vote). Over time, the Olympic Council's influence greatly diminished, and it became increasingly clear that the demands of hosting were so great that very few nations could realistically be expected to perform them. Paripana, Quakmybush, and Kelssek therefore took on hosting duties by default, in the absence of any competing bids and with no objection expected. By the time of the Fourth Summer Olympics, the process regained a degree of formality, although the Olympic Council as such still played no part. The host selection process was overseen by Kelssek, and featured a vote open to NOCs which had participated in at least one of the previous two Olympic Games. This process was repeated to select a host for the Fifth Winter Olympics, but the ratification of the Olympic Charter at the same vote means future votes have followed a more formal process.

As mentioned, hosting can be extremely time consuming, far more so than most other sporting events. Sign-ups typically open weeks in advance to allow sufficient time to register all entrants, and the generation and posting of results can take several hours, and is typically split up into two separate scorinations per day ("afternoon" and "evening", for RP purposes). xkoranate has become the standard means of simulating results for the last few Olympics, subject to periodic updates and occasional additions of new sports. At the same time, Olympic hosts are generally afforded more generous prerogatives than those of, for example, the World Cup: they could, to an extent, decide which events to include and which to drop, and which demonstration events to hold. This has seen the schedule of events fluctuate slightly over the course of the Games. By general convention, however, except for gender-inclusive moves like including women's ski jumping and boxing because we're classy like that, the events contested have been identical to those in the real-life Olympics. Under the Olympic Charter, the Executive Committee now sets standard lists of events, based on events contested in the real-life Olympics, which must be included in any Games, with an extended list of medal events which may be held or not, at each host's discretion.

Olympic Games host cities

Participation

An estimated 193 National Olympic Committees have sent delegations to at least one Olympic event. Qazox is the only nation to have participated in every Olympics; Qazox, Ariddia (later known as The Ariddian Isles), Capitalizt SLANI (formerly known as Commerce Heights) and Maineiacs have all competed at every edition of the Winter Olympics.

Sports

Though the programme of events contested has always been based on the real-life Olympic Games, the list of summer sports has changed subtly over time. The list of Winter Olympic events, on the other hand, has remained highly consistent over four editions. The Summer Olympics also sometimes include several demonstration sports, while only snow-angel making and bandy have been contested as demonstration events at the winter edition. The Winter Olympic programme has always consisted of fifteen official disciplines in seven sports. The only variations in the programme have been the exclusion of a women’s 5000 m speed skating event at the First Winter Olympics, and the inclusion of skicross at the failed Third Winter Olympics.

The Summer Olympic events list has changed on two occasions, with the most significant changes being made for the Second Summer Olympics. These changes included opening several events to women, including boxing and cycling events. Other changes included an expansion in the number of events in canoeing and the combat sports, and the elimination of cricket and rugby sevens. Some important alterations are also being made for the upcoming Fourth Summer Olympics, with the exclusion of baseball and softball and the elimination of some gymnastics events.

Notes

1. The Unified Capitalizt States, previously known as Commerce Heights, was a political unit within Paripana; in this context, these three terms all essentially refer to the same area.
2. The Third Winter Olympics in Revena, Quakmybush were abandoned prior to completion. Olympic records set in Revena are not considered official.