COUNTDOWN TO SUMMER GAMES OF THE XXXI OLYMPIAD, RIO 2016.

The 2016 Summer Olympics will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from 5 August to 21 August 2016, with preliminary competition in football to begin TODAY 3rd August 2016. As the Games officially begin, here are some key facts and figures about the first Olympics held in a South American country.

* This year's Games will be the first to include athletes born in the year 2000.  Although the rules state all competitors must have been born before 1 January 2013, some sports have other age requirements for health and safety reasons.

* The 2016 Olympic mascot is a mix of different animals called Vinicius, which pays tribute to the Brazilian musician Vinicius de Moraes. Vinicius and Tom are the official mascots for the 2016 Summer Olympics and Paralympics respectively in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

* The Olympic Torch will arrive in Rio on 5 August, after travelling for more than 90 days from Olympia in Greece - the birthplace of the Olympics.

*A record number of 207 countries are participating in a record number of sports, a total of 41 disciplines and 306 events, and 11,239 athletes.

*First time entrants Kosovo and South Sudan are scheduled to take part.

*With 306 sets of medals, the games will feature 28 Olympic sports, including new sports like rugby sevens and golf, which were recently added by International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2009.

*These sporting events will take place at 33 venues in the host city and at 5 venues in the cities of São Paulo (Brazil's largest city), Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Brasília (Brazil's capital), and Manaus.

*. Rio will become the first South American city to host the Summer Olympics. These will be the first games to be held in a Portuguese-speaking country, the first to be held entirely during the host country's winter season. The first since 1968 to be held in Latin America, and the first since 2000 (and third overall) to be held in the Southern Hemisphere.

*Both the opening ceremony Aug 5 and closing ceremony Aug 21 will be held at Macarana stadium.

*MAJOR ATHLETES TO WATCH

 USAIN BOLT, the fastest person ever timed,  he is the first man to hold both the 100 metres and 200 metres world records since fully automatic time measurements became mandatory in 1977 . He was the first in the modern Olympics era to achieve the "double double" of winning 100 m and 200 m titles at consecutive games (2008 and 2012) and will be aiming to extend it further by making it a 3peat in both events at Rio Olympic.

MICHAEL PHELPS, the most decorated Olympian of all time, with a total of 22 medals in three Olympiads. Phelps also holds the all-time records for Olympic gold medals (18, double the second highest record holders), Olympic gold medals in individual events (11), and Olympic medals in individual events for a male (13).Phelps will also aiming to extend such laudable records further at Rio Olympic.

BRIEF HISTORY OF OLYMPIC GAMES

The first written records of the ancient Olympic Games date to 776 B.C., when a cook from the city of Elis named Coroebus (first Olympic champion) won the only event–a 192-meter footrace called the stade (the origin of the modern “stadium”)–to become the first Olympic champion. The Ancient Games featured running events, a pentathlon (consisting of a jumping event, discus and javelin throws, a foot race, and wrestling), boxing, wrestling, pankration, and equestrian events. However, it is generally believed that the Games had been going on for many years by that time. Legend has it that Heracles (the Roman Hercules), son of Zeus and the mortal woman Alcmene, founded the Games, which by the end of the 6th century B.C had become the most famous of all Greek sporting festivals. The ancient Olympics were held every four years between August 6 and September 19 during a religious festival honoring Zeus. The Games were named for their location at Olympia, a sacred site located near the western coast of the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece. Their influence was so great that ancient historians began to measure time by the four-year increments in between Olympic Games, which were known as Olympiads

After the Roman Empire conquered Greece in the mid-2nd century B.C., the Games continued, but their standards and quality declined. In one notorious example from A.D. 67, the decadent Emperor Nero entered an Olympic chariot race, only to disgrace himself by declaring himself the winner even after he fell off his chariot during the event. In A.D. 393, Emperor Theodosius I, a Christian, called for a ban on all “pagan” festivals, ending the ancient Olympic tradition after nearly 12 centuries.

It would be another 1,500 years before the Games would rise again, largely thanks to the efforts of Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937) of France. Dedicated to the promotion of physical education, the young baron became inspired by the idea of creating a modern Olympic Games after visiting the ancient Olympic site. In November 1892, at a meeting of the Union des Sports Athlétiques in Paris, Coubertin proposed the idea of reviving the Olympics as an international athletic competition held every four years. Two years later, he got the approval he needed to found the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which would become the governing body of the modern Olympic Games.

The first modern Olympics were held in Athens, Greece, in 1896. In the opening ceremony, King Georgios I and a crowd of 60,000 spectators welcomed 280 participants from 13 nations (all male), who would compete in 43 events, including track and field, gymnastics, swimming, wrestling, cycling, tennis, weightlifting, shooting and fencing. All subsequent Olympiads have been numbered even when no Games take place (as in 1916, during World War I, and in 1940 and 1944, during World War II). The official symbol of the modern Games is five interlocking coloured rings, representing the continents of North and South America, Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia. The Olympic flag, featuring this symbol on a white background, flew for the first time at the Antwerp Games in 1920.

The Olympics truly took off as an international sporting event after 1924, when the VIII Games were held in Paris. Some 3,000 athletes (with more than 100 women among them) from 44 nations competed that year, and for the first time the Games featured a closing ceremony. The Winter Olympics debuted that year, including such events as figure skating, ice hockey, bobsledding and the biathlon. Eighty years later, when the 2004 Summer Olympics returned to Athens for the first time in more than a century, nearly 11,000 athletes from a record 201 countries competed. In a gesture that joined both ancient and modern Olympic traditions, the shot put competition that year was held at the site of the classical Games in Olympia.

In the early 20th century, many Olympic athletes began using drugs to improve their athletic abilities. For example, in 1904, Thomas Hicks, a gold medalist in the marathon, was given strychnine by his coach. The only Olympic death linked to performance enhancing occurred at the 1960 Rome games. A Danish cyclist, Knud Enemark Jensen, fell from his bicycle and later died. A coroner's inquiry found that he was under the influence of amphetamines. By the mid-1960s, sports federations started to ban the use of performance-enhancing drugs; in 1967 the IOC followed suit.

The first Olympic athlete to test positive for the use of performance-enhancing drugs was Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall, a Swedish pentathlete at the 1968 Summer Olympics, who lost his bronze medal for alcohol use. One of the most publicized doping-related disqualifications occurred after the 1988 Summer Olympics where Canadian sprinter, Ben Johnson (who won the 100-metre dash) tested positive for stanozolol. His gold medal was later stripped and awarded to the American runner-up Carl Lewis, who himself had tested positive for banned substances prior to the Olympics.

 KEY FACTS AND FIGURES ABOUT THE OLYMPIC

* Olympia is the site of the ancient Olympic Games.

* In 393 AD the Olympics were banned and Olympia was left abandoned. It wasn't until 1776 that Richard Chandler from the UK discovered the location of the ancient Olympics.

*The 1896 Games featured the first Olympic marathon, which followed the 25-mile route run by the Greek soldier who brought news of a victory over the Persians from Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C. Fittingly, Greece's Spyridon Louis won the first gold medal in the event. In 1924, the distance would be standardized to 26 miles and 385 yards

*The winners were instead given a silver medal and an olive branch at first Olympic held in Anthens 1896. While runners-up received a laurel branch and a copper or bronze medal

*The Olympic medal -First place (Gold): It is composed of silver of at least 0.925 grade, plated with 6 grams of gold, for  Second place medal(Silver) is around 0.925 silver, while the Third place medal(Bronze) is mostly copper with some tin and zinc (worth approximately $3).

* From 1896 till 1928 the medals ceremony traditionally took place during the Closing Ceremony of the Games, after that they have taken place after each event.

* The Olympic Anthem was composed by Spiros Samaras, to words by Kostas Palamas, for the first Games in Athens in 1896.  In 1958 it was officially adopted by the IOC for the 1960 games. It is now sung, or played during the opening ceremony as the Olympic flag is hoisted.  It is also played after the Olympics have finished during the closing ceremony as the flag is lowered.

*The first Games held under the auspices of the IOC were hosted in the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens in 1896. The Games brought together 14 nations and 241 athletes who competed in 43 events.  The second Olympics were held in Paris

*Charlotte Cooper of the United Kingdom, first woman Olympic champion, in the 1900 Games.

* The Olympic mascot, an animal or human figure representing the cultural heritage of the host country, was introduced in 1968.

* The Olympic motto, Citius, Altius, Fortius, a Latin expression meaning "Faster, Higher, and Stronger" was proposed by Pierre de Coubertin in 1894 and has been official since 1924

*The Olympic symbol, better known as the Olympic rings, consists of five intertwined rings and represents the unity of the five inhabited continents (Africa, America, Asia, Oceania, Europe). The coloured version of the rings—blue, yellow, black, green, and red—over a white field forms the Olympic flag. These colours were chosen because every nation had at least one of them on its national flag. The flag was adopted in 1914 but flown for the first time only at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium. It has since been hoisted during each celebration of the Games. The symbol was originally designed in 1912 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, co-founder of the modern Olympic Games

* Fire was a divine element to ancient Greeks; fires were kept alight in front of their principal temples and in front of Olympia - hence the Olympic Flame. The modern tradition of moving the Olympic Flame via a relay system from Greece to the Olympic venue began with the Berlin Games in 1936. The Olympic torch is carried by athletes, leaders, celebrities, and ordinary people alike, and at times in unusual conditions, such as being electronically transmitted via satellite for Montreal 1976, submerged underwater without being extinguished for Sydney 2000, or in space and at the North Pole for Sochi 2014. On the final day of the torch relay, the day of the Opening Ceremony, the Flame reaches the main stadium and is used to light a cauldron situated in a prominent part of the venue to signify the beginning of the Games.

*The names of all the medallists are engraved on the walls of the main stadium where the Olympic Games take place