Athletes from 206 nations and a refugee team are in Brazil to compete in 306 events in 28 Olympic sports and be watched by a global audience of billions.
These are the Games of the 31st Olympiad but are the 28th to be held as those in 1916, 1940 and 1944 did not take place because of war.
The Games - held in South America for the first time - officially take place between 5 and 21 August, but they have actually already started.
The opening ceremony is at midnight BST on Friday night Aug 05,2016 but the action kicked off two days ago on Wednesday Aug 03,2016 with the women's football.
There will be 10,500 athletes from a record 207 teams competing in Rio, including the Refugee Olympic Team, while it will be the first time Kosovo and South Sudan have taken part in the Games
Competitions will take place across 32 venues in Rio de Janeiro, with football matches also scheduled for the cities of Belo Horizonte, Brasilia, Manaus, Salvador and Sao Paulo.
A Refugee Olympic Team would enter Rio as "a message of hope for all the refugees in our world".
There are 10 members of the refugee team, including Syrian swimmer Yusra Mardini.
The Refugee Olympic Team will compete under the Olympic flag and has 10 members - five from South Sudan, two from Syria, two from DR Congo and one from Ethiopia.
With 554 athletes, the United States has the largest Olympic team, but 100m runner Etimoni Timuani is the only athlete from the South Pacific nation of Tuvalu.
The Rio Games will be the first to feature Olympians born since the year 2000 - and the youngest is 13-year-old Nepalese swimmer Gaurika Singh.
This is Vinicius, the Olympics mascot, who is modelled on a range of different animals in Brazil who have clearly developed a way of interbreeding.
He is named after Vinicius de Moraes, a Rio poet and playwright who died in 1980 and is one of Brazil's most-loved artists (he wrote The Girl from Ipanema, among many other songs).
And here he is with Tom, the Paralympics mascot - he's named after Tom Jobim, Vinicius de Moraes' writing partner.
He, apparently, represents a mix of Brazilian flora and fauna
No comments:
Post a Comment