Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics Closing Ceremony Live Discussions

The Winter Olympics are a major sporting event, similar to the popular Summer Olympics, which occurs once every four years. The first Winter Olympics was held in Charmonix, France, in the year 1924 and followed a four year patter until 1936, post which it had to be halted due to the World War II. They resumed in 1948 and were held every four years, coinciding with the Summer Olympics. However, the International Olympic Committee came to a decision in the year 1986 to place the Summer and Winter Olympics in different 4 year cycles in even numbered years.

Quite like its name suggests, the Winter Olympics' games are winter sports, such as ice-hockey, free-style skiing, luge etc. The first game held in 1924 only had alpine, cross country skiing, figure skating, ice-hockey, Nordic combined, ski jumping and speed skating as its official games. As time has passed, many other games have been added to the official list of games such as luge, style skating, snowboarding, etc; while games such as bandy and skiijoring are categorised as demonstration sports.

The Winter Olympics have been hosted in 3 continents, but never in the Southern Hemisphere. The United States of America has hosted the games 4 times, and France has hosted in 3 times. The last Winter Olympics in the year 2010 was hosted by Vancouver, Canada; and the entire event was a huge success. This year's Winter Olympics will be held in the Russian city of Sochi, which is the first time the games will be held in a Russian city.

The 22nd Winter Olympics 2014 will be held in Sochi, Russia. This is the first time that the games are being held in a Russian city after the breakup of the Russian Federation in 1991; as Moscow hosted the Winter Olympics back in 1980. While most of the games will be held in Sochi, some of the games will also be held in the resort settlement of Krasnaya Polyana.

There will be a total of 98 events from 15 disciplines during the games. Quite a few games have been added, including mixed-team figure skating, mixed-team luge and half-pipe skiing, amongst others. While originally budgeted at USD 12B, various factors prompted the budget to blow up to a whopping USD 51B, making this the most expensive Olympic games till date.

Opting for a rather simplistic and futuristic design, the emblem for this time's Winter Olympic Games has the lettering for "Sochi" and "2014" designed to mirror each other vertically. This is to symbolise the  contrasts in Russia's landscape, especially that of Sochi. Unfortunately, this emblem faced a lot of flak and criticism, especially from Russian bloggers, who felt that the design was way too simple and lacked any actual symbolism.

The mascot for the Winter Olympics and the Paralympic Games was declared on the 26th of February, 2011 after a general public voting was conducted within the nation. The general consensus came to agree on the following characters to be the mascots for the games.

[From right to left]: The Polar Bear [by Oleg Serdechny, Sochi], The European Hare [by Silviya Petrova, Chuvashia] and The Amur Leopard [by Vadim Pak, Nakhodka]

On the 29th of September, 2013, the Olympic torch was lit in Ancient Olympia. This began a 7 day journey across Greece and onto Russia. The torch relay then began at Moscow on the 7th of October, 2013, and will pass through a total of 83 Russian cities before finally being lit at Sochi on the day of the opening ceremony. This is the longest torch relay in Olympian history, with the Olympic torch spanning a total of 40000 miles and traversing from one end of Russia [Kaliningrad in the East] to the other end [Chukokta in the West] before finally landing at Sochi.

There will be a total of 88 nations participating during the games, which beats the previous record of 82 nations set during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada.