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2004: Athens

The Olympic Games returned to their classic origins in Greece on August 13, 2004, when 10,625 athletes from 201 countries descended upon Athens to compete for global athletic supremacy in world dizzy with post-9/11 madness.

There were well-founded fears of terrorist attacks, so much so that the host country’s budget for security climbed to $1.2 billion (US) and some 70,000 police officers patrolled Athens and the Olympic venues, with  NATO and the European Union on call if needed.

Despite the foreboding, the Athens Olympics began with an extravagant, almost hallucinatory, opening ceremony designed by avant-garde choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou.

2000: Sydney

American sprint queen Marion Jones set herself the target of winning five gold medals at Sydney 2000 and fell only marginally short of that goal by winning three gold and two bronze medals.  Too bad that seven years later she admitted she took performance enhancing drugs and had to return all her medals.

As Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency COMMA said when she was sentenced in Janurary, 2008, “When something seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

Such was not the case for Australian swim sensation Ian Thorpe with his size 17 flipper-feet.  He fell short of his goal, but had a magnificent Games, winning five medals.

1996: Atlanta

The 1996 Olympics were meant to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the modern Olympics. Instead, terrorism, logistical nightmares and over-the-top commercialism marred the event.

What took place in the early morning hours of July 27 left a lasting memory on the Atlanta Games. For the first time in 24 years, terrorism reared its ugly head at the Olympics. Not since the 1972 murders of 11 Israeli athletes had there been such violence at the event hailed as a symbol of world peace.

On day nine of the Atlanta Olympics, a bomb exploded at Centennial Olympic Park, leaving two people dead and more than a hundred injured. Richard Jewell, a security officer at the Games, who had found the bomb, was wrongfully fingered as a suspect, and became the target of a media witch-hunt for the culprit.

1992: Barcelona

By the beginning of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the world's political landscape had drastically changed. The Soviet Union no longer existed, East and West Germany were reunited, and apartheid had ended in South Africa. The first Olympics of the post-Cold War era would signal hope for renewed harmony in international relations.

Barcelona, the birthplace of IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, would welcome 169 nations, the largest total to that point. The Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia were once again independent, but the former Soviet republics competed together for one year as the Commonwealth of Independent States, or Unified Team. Germany competed as one nation, and South Africa returned to the Olympics after a 32-year exile.

1988: Seoul

The 1988 Seoul Olympics will forever be linked to one Canadian. Unfortunately.

Sprinter Ben Johnson tested positive for steroids, just three days after he captured the heart of the nation by winning gold and shattering the world record in the Games' marquee event, the men's 100-metre race. Not only did he lose his gold medal to American Carl Lewis, but his record time of 9.79 seconds was also erased.

Johnson was not the first Olympian to be caught with performance enhancing drugs, but he was a tremendously popular athlete involved in the highest-profile event of the Olympics. Johnson's drug scandal stoked a media frenzy and gave rise to the Dubin Inquiry into steroid use by Canadian athletes. It also overshadowed a number of Canadian heroics at the Olympics.

1984: Los Angeles

Like its predecessor in 1980, the 1984 Olympics may be remembered more for who didn't show up than for who did.

Fifty-two years after the 1932 Los Angeles Games, the Summer Games returned to American soil, and once again, Los Angeles was the host city. But this time, boycotts left their indelible mark.

The Soviet Union-led boycott, a retaliation for the absence of the U.S. and its allies four years earlier in Moscow, left a huge athletic gap as Soviet bloc sports powerhouses like East Germany and the Soviet Union stayed home. Romania was the only Warsaw Pact nation to attend and made the most of not being overshadowed by its more powerful allies, finishing third overall with 53 medals.

1980: Moscow

The modern Olympics have had their share of boycotts, but nothing approaching the magnitude of the Moscow Summer Olympics in 1980.

The first Games to be held in a communist country were disrupted by an even larger boycott than Montreal. This one, led by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, was to protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

After Carter's deadline for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan passed on February 20th,Carter declared that neither he, nor the American people would support sending American athletes to Moscow, and his administration put enormous pressure on the U.S. Olympic Committee to support his boycott. So much for the Western democratic ideal of keeping politics out of the Games.

1976: Montreal

With the Montreal Summer Games of 1976, Canada hosted the Olympics for the first time. Montreal's flamboyant mayor, Jean Drapeau, worked non-stop during the bidding process to persuade the IOC that his city was the one for these Games. His lobbying paid off, as Montreal emerged as the underdog winner of the bidding process, beating out higher-profile candidates like Moscow and Los Angeles.

Drapeau believed that hosting these Games would bring Montreal to the world, and vice versa, in a repeat of the Expo 67 phenomenon of Expo 67. To Drapeau, there was no reason a similar international event couldn't be pulled off without extravagant costs.

1972: Munich

There was a giddy air of optimism surrounding the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics. They boasted the most athletes from the most countries participating in the most events with the most media coverage in the history of the Olympics.

Even the Olympic infrastructure was an architectural masterpiece. Upon being awarded the Games in 1966, Munich organizers spent $650 million (US) on an intricate tent-like design erected over the bombed-out ruins of the Second World War. It seemed to herald a euphoric and peaceful new era for the Games.

And so it seemed until September 5, 10 days after the Games' triumphant opening. That night, eight Palestinian militants broke into the Israeli team's headquarters in the Olympic Village. Two Israelis were killed immediately and nine others were taken hostage.

1968: Mexico

Considering all that was going on in the world, it would have taken all the good will on Earth for the 1968 Games not to be politicized.

The United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War and was dealing with the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, while across the country, student-led counterculture and anti-war protests added to the turmoil.

France had its own student revolts, and the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, putting a crushing end to the brief flowering of free expression there known as Prague Spring. And shortly before the Games opened, Mexico had its own political crisis.

Restless students protested against the government's exorbitant spending on new, modern athletic facilities, when comparatively little was spent on Mexico's growing social problems. Mexican police and military intervened, riots erupted, and by the official count, 49 people died. Many believe, though, that the real number of dead would be more like 250, and debate rages this day on the extent of the massacre.

1964: Tokyo

Tokyo was originally slated to be the first Asian Olympic host city for the 1940 Games, but Japan's war with China put an end to that. It became a moot point, anyway, when the Second World War forced the outright cancellation of the 1940 Olympics.

Twenty-four years and $3 billion later, Tokyo finally hosted the Olympics. The Japanese celebrated the 1964 Tokyo Games in mid-October as a proclamation of their country's post-War reconstruction and emergence as a major political and economic force in the world. To underline that theme, the final torchbearer was Yoshinori Sakai, who was born in Hiroshima the day the city was destroyed by an atomic bomb.

1960: Rome

It took more than 30 years, but with the 1960 Games in Rome, the Olympics finally did not have a pall cast over them by political tensions or worldwide economic problems.

There were some political overtones -- China was not happy that Taiwan competed independently as Formosa, and following the 1960 Games, the International Olympic Committee would ban South Africa to express its displeasure over the country's racist apartheid system.

But what politics there were in Rome seemed relatively muted, especially in comparison with the fractiousness surrounding the 1956 Olympics. The atmosphere was much more buoyant, partly because Rome was so thrilled to finally host the Olympics, particularly since it was forced to give up the 1908 Olympics in the aftermath of the 1906 eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.

1956: Melbourne

Melbourne won the right to hold the 1956 Olympics by one vote over Buenos Aires. Despite that close vote, the Games were not held in the Southern Hemisphere again until they returned to Australia in 2000. The 1956 Games was also the only time an Olympics has been held in two different cities. Because of Australia's strict animal quarantine laws, the equestrian events were held in Stockholm, Sweden, in June of that year.

The Games were held in Melbourne from November 22 to December 8, the latest the Summer Olympics have ever been held - and that was not even summer in Australia. And plenty happened in the 10-plus months before they opened.

1952: Helsinki

Finland was a natural choice to host the Olympics in 1952. Along with Sweden, Finland was the greatest overachiever in the first half-century of the Games, routinely winding up in the top five in the medal standings despite its population.

At the very least, the International Olympic Committee could feel confident that Helsinki would take staging the Games very seriously. Indeed, the Helsinki Games were considered a rousing success. Like the 1912 Stockholm Games, the Helsinki Olympics were a model of organization and efficiency -- so much so that some suggested permanently staging the Olympics in Scandinavia.

1948: London

It took 12 years for the Olympics to be staged again after the 1936 Berlin Games.

Tokyo was slated to host the 1940 Olympics, but Japan withdrew when it went to war against China. The Games were reassigned to Helsinki, but those plans collapsed when the Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939. Of course, the Second World War ultimately mooted the question and forced the cancellation of both the 1940 and 1944 Games.

Three years after peace returned to Europe, the Olympics returned to London. The plan wasn't universally popular in London -- some thought Britain should have been focusing on post-War reconstruction, not an athletic festival.

1936: Berlin

The hope was that the 1936 Berlin Olympics would be a beacon of hope in the global shadow cast by the Great Depression. Germany's Third Reich had other ideas and planned to use the Games as a glittering showcase of Aryan superiority.

More than anything else, though, the Games turned out to be about Jesse Owens, the African-American son of an Alabama sharecropper whose world records and four gold medals made a mockery of Nazi ideology.

1932: Los Angeles

Mired in the Great Depression, much of the world was in a deep funk in 1932. And yet somehow, the 1932 Olympics drew 1.25 million spectators and turned a $1-million profit. Los Angeles may have been the only place where the 1932 Games could have turned out so well.

Los Angeles organizers did a lot of the right things. They issued a three-cent Olympic stamp to generate revenue and began an Olympic tradition. They also staged the Games over 16 days -- one-fifth the length of the shortest Olympics prior to 1932. It was a wise move that became the Olympic standard.

1928: Amsterdam

Amsterdam wanted to host the 1916 Olympics, but they were cancelled because of the First World War. Amsterdam tried again in 1920 and was supposed to host them in 1924, but the International Olympic Committee's weakness for symbolic gestures intervened, and those Games went to Antwerp and Paris, respectively.

Finally, Amsterdam got its chance in 1928, over the objections of its own monarch. Queen Wilhelmine thought the Olympics were a pagan festival and refuses to make an appearance at either the opening or closing ceremonies.

Those opening ceremonies showed the Dutch had a flair for symbolism themselves. After a decade of post-war uncertainty, the ceremonies featured the release of doves, and the first lighting of the Olympic flame, which burned continuously throughout the Games.

1924: Paris

The 1924 Olympics had been scheduled for Amsterdam, but in his final act as International Olympic Committee President, Pierre de Coubertin pulled rank. Despite the misgivings of a number of IOC members, de Coubertin transferred the 1924 Olympics to Paris. De Coubertin wanted to give his native France a chance to redeem itself after the fiasco of the 1900 Paris Games.

Fortunately for the Olympic movement and the reputations of Paris and de Coubertin, the French had their act together this time. The Games were becoming more professionally run, for starters, and it also helped that by 1924, the public had acquired a taste for big sport spectacle. Media and fans alike flocked to tennis's Wimbledon and French Opens and golfing's British and French Opens.

1920: Antwerp

The 1916 Olympics were awarded to Berlin. But even when the First World War broke out in 1914, International Olympic Committee chairman Pierre de Coubertin was reluctant to cancel the Games. Plans were still going ahead because it was thought that the war would last only a few months.

Four years and 10 million dead later, Antwerp, Belgium, was awarded the Games as a symbolic gesture, signifying that the Olympic spirit could triumph in a country that had been ravaged by war. It was all well-intended, but Antwerp was probably not the best choice, since Belgium was still rebuilding.

1912: Stockholm

The 1912 Olympic games in Stockholm, Sweden, marked a genuine coming of age for the Olympic movement. For the first time, the Olympic Games took on a truly international tone, with athletes representing five different continents for the first time.

The Stockholm Games were the fifth and most successful Olympics to that point, serving as a future model of organizational standards. The time Swedish organizers had to prepare -- four full years, unlike the last-minute scrambles of previous Olympics -- had much to do with Stockholm's success. A 22,000-seat stadium and new swimming pool were built, as well as accommodations for the athletes.

1908: London

The 1908 Olympic Games were originally awarded to Rome, as IOC boss Pierre de Coubertin had wished, but 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius changed everything. The eruption saddled Italy with relief and reconstruction costs and an economic crisis, and the country abruptly cancelled its plans to stage the Games.

London stepped into the breach and quickly built a new 68,000-seat stadium at White City, in the Shepherds Bush district of the city, in addition to organizing an expanded slate of Olympic roster. The London Olympics were far better organized than its predecessors in 1900 (Paris) and 1904 (St. Louis), but officials couldn't do much about the wet, dreary weather. And there were plenty more eruptions -- mostly political.

1906: Athens

If the 1896 Athens Games breathed life into the modern Olympic movement, the disastrous Olympics of 1900 in Paris and 1904 in St. Louis all but smothered it through poor organization and public indifference. The modern Olympic founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, figured that the best medicine for the flagging Olympics would be to return them to their roots in Athens.

Rome had already been slated to host the next scheduled Olympics in 1908, but de Coubertin arranged with the Greek government and the IOC to hold an interim or so-called "intercalated" Olympics in 1906 to mark the 10th anniversary of the Olympic revival.

The International Olympic Committee was cool to the idea, but de Coubertin and the IOC reached a compromise: the 1906 Games would not be deemed an official Olympics. And de Coubertin's original scheme to stage an intercalated Games every four years was quickly scrapped.

1904: St Louis

Mistake number one: the International Olympic Committee didn't learn from the mistakes made with the 1900 Paris Games, which were neglected in the shadow of the World's Fair to disastrous effect. Otherwise, the IOC would not have agreed to tie the 1904 Games to another major exposition. In 1904 it was the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Purchase that nearly killed the fledgling Olympic movement.

The 1904 Games were originally scheduled for Chicago, but Exhibition organizers in St. Louis worried the Olympics would detract from their event's attendance and threatened to hold separate sporting competitions of their own. Fearing that the outcome would mean disaster for both spectacles, the IOC went along with U.S. President Roosevelt's proposal to relocate the Olympics to St. Louis.

1900: Paris

After the success of the Olympic revival of 1896, Athens wanted to host the second modern Olympiad in 1900. Olympic godfather Pierre de Coubertin may well have wished the Greeks had gotten their wish, once he took stock of the fiasco his on country, France, made of the Games.

Greece felt that as the historic home of the Olympics, it held a permanent right to host the Games. The International Olympic Committee opted for a rotation of hosts. The Greek-Turkish War, which was flaring at the time, made the IOC even less inclined to stage the Games in Athens again.

Besides, Paris was already hosting the World's Fair in 1900, and it seemed an obvious and appealing tie-in to the IOC to stage the Olympics in the City of Light. But the move backfired: It was enough to make de Coubertin later remark, "It's a miracle the Olympic movement survived these Games."

1896: Athens

After several failed attempts by the British, the Swedes and the Greeks to revive the Olympic Games, French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin was finally persistent enough to get things rolling. In 1894, de Coubertin gathered 79 delegates from 12 countries to attend an international congress for the re-establishment of the Olympic Games.

Brandishing a mission statement promoting friendly competition among amateur athletes, de Coubertin hoped this in turn would promote friendly relations among the world’s nations. He received permission from the delegation to form the International Olympic Committee. Two years later, on April 6, 1896, the Games returned to Athens.

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