19th February: Winter Olympics

With the Winter Olympics in full swing: 10 things you may not know about the Winter Olympics.

1. The first Winter Olympic Games were held in Chamonix, France in 1924.
2. The first person to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics was Charlew Jewtraw, from Lake Placid in the United States, for the 500 meters speed skating title in 1924. The first Winter Olympic female gold medalist was Herma Planck Szabo of Austria in the Figure Skating Event in 1924.
3. The first Winter Games to be televised were the 1956 Games in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy. The first to be broadcast in colour was in Grenoble, France in 1968.
4. The oldest man to receive a Winter Olympics medal is Anders Haugen, at 83. He was not, however, as old as that when he actually competed. The Norwegian-American received his ski jump bronze medal 50 years after he competed in 1924, when a scoring error was discovered in 1974.
5. No country in the Southern Hemisphere has ever hosted a Winter Games.
6. Four winter Olympic sports take place indoors. They are hockey, curling, figure skating, and speed skating.
7. Man-made Snow was used in the Olympics for the first time at the 1980 Games in Lake Placid.
8. The most medals won by any athletes at the Winter Olympic Games is 12 by cross-country skier Bjorn Dählie of Norway. Cross country skier Raisa Smetanina (USSR) is the woman who has won most, taking 10 medals (four gold; five silver; one bronze). The country which has won the most Winter Olympic medals is Norway.
9. The Sochi 2014 Olympic Torch was the first to travel in space - one leg of the relay involved a spacewalk by Russian cosmonauts.
10. The 2018 Winter Olympics will be held in PyeongChang, South Korea. It will be the first time South Korea has hosted the Winter Games.