Olympics are a global sporting event held every four years where the best sporting talents from around the world compete in multiple sporting events. Olympics as a whole have been broadly divided into two major categories, that of Winter Olympics and Summer Olympics events. Both of the events are held after an interval of four years individually, and are held alternatively after a mutual gap of two years. As, for instance, the most recent Winter Olympics were held in Turin, Italy in 2006 which will be followed by the Summer Olympics event to be held in Beijing, China in 2008. The next Winter Olympics are slated to be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 2010 followed by the Summer Olympics event to be hosted by London in 2012.
Winter Olympics exclusively features 7 snow-sporting events divided into 15 disciplines which include bobsled, cross-country skiing, curling, downhill skiing, figure skating, ice hockey, luge, snowboarding and speed skating. The Winter Olympics attracts relatively scarcer participation due to lack of winter sport training facilities in various countries with incompatible climatic conditions. It is summer Olympics, thus, which steals the limelight as the mainstream sporting event held under the Olympics banner with the sheer number of participants outdoing the Winter Olympics by a magnitude.
Initially, the first figure skating event has featured in the 1908 Summer Olympics held in London and it was not until 1924 that the first official Winter Olympics Event was held in Chamonix by the International Olympic Committee. The snowboarding event was the last one to be included in the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan in 1998.
