Did you know that the youngest Olympian ever was a 10-year-old? Or that at the Paris Olympic Games in 1900, real pigeons were used for skeet shooting targets?
■ In the ancient Olympic Games, a flame would be ignited by the sun and then kept burning until the closing of the games. The flame first appeared in modern Olympics at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam and nowadays is still lit using a curved mirror and the sun. The Olympic Torch relay represents a continuation from ancient Olympic Games to the modern ones.
■ The last Olympic Games medals that were made entirely of gold were awarded in 1912.
■ Women were first allowed to participate in the Olympic Games in 1900.
■ During the opening ceremony, the procession of athletes is always led by the Greek team, followed by all the other teams in alphabetical order, with the last team being that of the hosting country.
■ Walt Disney was head of the committee that organised the opening day ceremonies at the 1960 Winter Olympic Games held in California. The ceremony featured high school choirs and bands, thousands of balloons, fireworks, statues and national flags dropped by parachute.
■ The five rings on the Olympic flag symbolise the five continents. However, three continents – Africa, South America and Antarctica – have never hosted the Olympic Games.
■ The first Olympic Games to be televised were the Berlin games in 1936.
■ At the 1896 Olympic Games in Athens, the winners received a silver medal and an olive branch, and second placed athletes got a bronze medal. Third placed athletes received nothing.
■ Although China frequently tops the medal winning charts, it only won its first medal in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, when Xu Haifeng won gold in the 50-metre pistol event.
■ The youngest Olympian ever was Dimitrios Loundras, a 10-year-old Greek gymnast at the 1996 Athens Olympics. The oldest Olympian ever was 72-year-old Oscar Swahn, a Swedish shooter at the 1920 Antwerp Olympic Games.
■ At this year’s London Olympic Games, around 20,000 broadcasters, photographers and journalists will be covering the games. They will be hosted in a media centre that also houses banks, newsagents and a post office.
■ The security budget for the London Olympics is more than €700m, which will also cover the deployment of 13,500 members of the Armed Forces.
■ The London 2012 Olympic Village will be home to 10,500 athletes.
■ At the 1900 Olympic Games in Paris, the skeet shooting targets were real pigeons. Belgian sharpshooter Leon de Lunden won the gold medal with a perfect score of 300 birds.
■ When Usain Bolt arrived in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, only a handful of camera crews were waiting for him at the airport. By the time he left, every camera in the world was zooming in on him.