The Winter Olympic Games (the 2010 Winter Olympics will be held in Vancouver) is a multi-sport event held every four years, and some of the most-watched competitions are on snow and ice. The 2010 games will feature sixteen sports, under which fall a variety of disciplines.

Snow sports are: downhill (alpine) skiing, cross-country (Nordic) skiing, biathlon, ski jumping, snowboarding, Nordic combined, and freestyle skiing. Most unfamiliar to viewers is the sport called biathlon, meaning to join two sports. It originated out of necessity in northern Europe; Nordic men used skis to carry themselves to hunting grounds, shoot their game and return home with the family meal on skis. Another lesser-known sport is freestyle skiing. Created during the 1960s to express the era’s freedom movement, it combines downhill skiing and acrobatics. Freestyle skiing became an official Olympic sport at the 1992 Winter Olympic Games in Albertville, France.

Ice sports are: figure skating, speed skating, short track speed skating, ice hockey, and curling. The less-famous sport of curling has cloudy origins as well, but is first documented as a game in Scotland in 1540. It consists of two teams competing at the same time, side by side, to push a number of 19-kilogram stones across ice toward concentric circles. Each game features four players and each player has two stones that they ‘throw’ (actually push) across the ice. The game must be played in ten ‘ends’, much like baseball has innings, and the team to get their stones closest to the concentric circles is the winner. The term ‘curl’ is the name for the path the stone takes. It wasn’t until 1992 that curling became an officially recognized Winter Olympic sport.

Sliding sports are: bobsleigh, luge, and skeleton. Each sport is a variation of sledding, and since each sport is played in heats, winning consists the lowest combined time. Bobsleigh is a 2-4 person sport (2 and 4 for men; 2 for women), and involves pushing a bobsleigh for approximately 165 feet before jumping in. The slider in the front controls the steering, and the slider in the back operates the brake at the end of the run. The bobsleigh became an official Olympic sport for men in 1932 and for women in 2002. The luge can be a singles or doubles event, and requires the slider to use pressure from the calves and shoulders to steer the luge, and to break he must sit up and pull on the sled runners whilst putting his feet down. The luge made its Olympic debut in the 1964 games at Innsbruck, Austria. The skeleton is a solitary event, and got its name because the sled resembles that of a human skeleton. Sliders train like sprinters to develop powerful back legs that create a powerful burst of speed at the beginning of the race. This speed is crucial, as getting just one-tenth of a second of extra speed at the beginning can result in a three-tenths of a second lead at the end of the run. Skeleton made a show in the 1924 and 1948 Winter Olympics, but became a permanent fixture for both men and women at the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City.