The earliest Olympic games can be traced possibly as far back as the fourteenth century B.C.E. in ancient Greece. Sadly, they were banned by the Romans in 393 C.E. because the Olympics mixed sports with the pagan religion. In 1896, the summer Olympics, held in Athens, Greece, were revived by Pierre de Coubertin as he was looking for a way the French could become physically fit in order to excel to the fitness level of the Germans. The idea for Winter Olympics arose in 1908 when figure skating made an appearance at the Summer Games in London. The first singles champions were ten-time world champion Ulrich Salchow of Sweden and Madge Syers of Britian. Anna Hubler and Heinrich Berger of Germany won the pairs competion.

The 1916 Summer Games organizers in Berlin planned to introduce a "Skiing Olympia," but after the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the games were cancelled. In 1920 the games resumed in Antwerp, Belgium where ice hockey was added as a medal event and figure skating returned. Although the events of the eleven-day "International Winter Sports Week" in Chamonix, France are usually called the first Winter Games, the first official Winter Games were held in 1928 in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

In 1994, the 17th edition of the Winter Olympics took place in Lillehammer, Norway seventy years after the very first winter games. The event ended the four-year Olympic cycle of staging both Winter and Summer Games in the same year but in different cities and began the alternation of the Winter and Summer Olympics every two years.