The 2010 Olympic Winter Games will take place from 12 to 28 February in Vancouver and Whistler.
Vancouver won the bidding race to hold the XXI Olympic Winter Games by beating off competition from seven other prospective host cities in the process. The final decision was made at the 115th IOC Session in Prague on 2 July 2003, bringing the Games back to Canada twenty-two years after their previous appearance, in Calgary in 1988.
The Olympic Winter Games is the world’s biggest winter sporting event. Vancouver 2010 will include 84 medal events across seven sports. An estimated 5,000 athletes and officials from around 85 countries are expected to participate.
The Games will be staged across two main areas within the British Columbia region, with ice events and two skiing events to be based in the vicinity of Vancouver, while the alpine, nordic and the sliding disciplines will all take place in Whistler, approximately 120 kilometres north of Vancouver.
Vancouver: curling, figure skating, ice hockey, short track speed skating, speed skating.
Cypress Mountain (West Vancouver): freestyle skiing, snowboarding.
Whistler: alpine skiing, biathlon, bobsleigh, cross country skiing, luge, nordic combined, skeleton, ski jumping.
Whistler will also play host to the 2010 Paralympic Winter Games, which will take place from 12 to 21 March.
The venue for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies will be Vancouver’s BC Place Stadium. Click here to view further information on the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games venues.
The 2010 sport programme will include all events from the previous Olympic Winter Games, including the speed skating team pursuit, biathlon mass start, cross country team sprint, and snowboard cross events, which were new to the programme in Turin.
In addition, the 2010 programme includes for the first time ski cross for men and women in the discipline of freestyle skiing, and will feature format changes to skeleton and speed skating. In skeleton, two runs will be added to the existing two, to give a total of four runs. In speed skating, the seeding rounds will be removed in the team pursuit event. Click here to view the competition schedule.
With a focus on sustainability, all of Vancouver 2010’s venues, including the Olympic Village, are being built with post-Games usage in mind to create sustainable legacies for Canadian sport. The Vancouver 2010 Organising Committee describe their ultimate goal as “Putting on a Games that will inspire their nation and promote the Olympic spirit both within Canada and worldwide.”
Canada has twice hosted the Olympic Games. In 1976, Montreal was the location for the Olympic Games. In 1988, Calgary, where Team GB will have its Preparation Camp in 2010, was the site of the Olympic Winter Games, which featured more than 1,400 athletes from 57 nations.
Click here to visit the Vancouver 2010 official website for more information.