Every venue of every Olympics that Wikipedia lists, 1,153 places for 66 Summer, Winter and Youth Games, on one map. Where the Games went, how far each one spread, which stadiums were used again, and what became of them: still in use, demolished, closed or quietly taken down when the visitors went home.
When Athens staged the first modern Olympics in 1896, the whole thing fitted into 7 places, all but one of them within a short ride of the marble Panathenaic Stadium. Paris 2024 used 45, from the Stade de France to a surf break in Tahiti. In between, cities have built and borrowed stadiums, pools, rinks, ski jumps and shooting ranges, sometimes brilliantly and sometimes at ruinous cost. What happened to them all afterwards?
English Wikipedia files every Olympic venue it has an article for in a category such as "Venues of the 1936 Summer Olympics". I collected all 66 of those categories, matched every article to Wikidata, and read what both sources say about each place today. The result is a map of 1,153 venues for 58 Summer and Winter Games (including those planned for Los Angeles, the French Alps and Brisbane) and 8 Youth Olympics, which I keep separate. Pick a Games below to fly to it, or press play and watch the Olympics travel.
Dots: every venue with coordinates in its Wikipedia article (1,038 of 1,153). Filled dots are buildings and built sports grounds, coloured by what the sources say became of them; rings are open air sites (parks, lakes, roads, mountains) and towns or districts listed as venues, for which a fate does not apply. A venue used by several Games is one dot. Choosing a Games zooms to the venues around its middle (within four times the median distance, between 25 and 400 km); the side panel lists the ones further away. Sources: English Wikipedia categories and article intros (CC BY-SA 4.0), Wikidata (CC0). Outlines: Natural Earth. Optional base map tiles © Esri.
Of the 55 Summer and Winter Games held so far, 17 Summer and 15 Winter editions went to Europe, 58% of the total. North America has had 6 Summer and 6 Winter Games, 8 of them in the United States; Asia 4 of each. Oceania has hosted the Summer Games twice, in Melbourne and Sydney, and South America once, in Rio de Janeiro. No Winter Games has been held outside Europe, North America and East Asia, and Africa has yet to host either: the 7 Youth Olympics so far went to Asia, Europe and Buenos Aires, and Dakar's Youth Games of 2026 are the first on the continent.
Where the Olympics have been held, by continent
Games held to 2026-11-02, by the host's continent as Wikipedia's host city list gives it, and Games already awarded but not yet held. Hover a bar.
Several cities came back. London has hosted three Summer Games, Paris three and Los Angeles will have its third in 2028; Athens, Tokyo, St. Moritz, Lake Placid and Innsbruck have each had two, and Beijing is the only city to have held both the Summer (2008) and the Winter (2022) Games. Those repeat hosts are where most reused venues are found.
The number of venues has grown with the Games. Summer Olympics before 1940 used 14.0 venues on average in Wikipedia's categories; those since 1990 have used 38.9, peaking at 45 for Paris 2024. Los Angeles has 49 venues listed for 2028. Winter Games grew from 3 venues at Chamonix in 1924 to a peak of 20 at Turin in 2006, an average of 15.5 since 1990.
Venues per Games
Members of each "Venues of the ... Olympics" category after removing lists, athletes' villages, media centres and events. Bars are stacked by kind: buildings, open air sites, and towns or districts listed as venues. Hollow bars: Games not yet held. Hover a bar; click to see it on the map.
These are counts of Wikipedia articles, not an official tally. A venue without its own article is missing, and a few categories also list the town where an event took place (Le Havre for sailing in 1900 and 1924, Teahupoʻo for surfing in 2024) rather than a stadium. As a check, Wikipedia's own "List of Olympic venues" counts 985 venues for the 54 Summer and Winter Games it covers, against 1,065 category members here; the two track each other closely Games by Games (correlation 0.98).
To measure how spread out each Games was, I take the middle of its venues (the median latitude and longitude) and the distance from there to each venue. Half of the venues of a typical Summer Games lie within 8.4 km of that middle. The most compact were Berlin 1936 (2.1 km), St. Louis 1904 and Athens 1896 (3.6 km). The most scattered were Atlanta 1996 (24.4 km) and Los Angeles 1984 (18.2 km), which both reached far across the United States, to the Miami Orange Bowl and to Harvard Stadium in Boston.
How far the venues spread
For each Games, the median distance of its venues from their middle (dot) and the distance to the farthest venue (tick). Logarithmic scale. Rivers and roads, which Wikipedia places at one arbitrary point, are left out. Hover a dot; click to see it on the map.
The Winter Games tell a different story. Until the 1980s they were held in one resort: at St. Moritz in 1928, half the venues lay within 0.4 km of the middle, and at Lake Placid in 1932 within 0.1 km. The median for Winter Games before 1990 is 1.7 km. Since then Winter Games have paired a city, for the ice events, with mountains for the snow, and the median has risen to 18.9 km. Milan Cortina 2026 was the most scattered Olympics of all, with half its venues more than 104 km from the middle and the farthest 176 km away; the French Alps plan for 2030 (59 km) is the next most spread.
Paris 2024's surfing took place 15,724 km from the rest of the Games, at Teahupoʻo in Tahiti.
The farthest outliers are single events sent abroad. The equestrian events of Melbourne 1956 were held in Stockholm, 15,597 km away, because of Australia's quarantine rules for horses; Beijing 2008 held its riding in Hong Kong (1,966 km), and Rio 2016 played football as far away as Manaus (2,846 km). 6 Summer Games had at least one venue more than 1,000 km from the middle.
88 venues, 7.6% of all, appear in the categories of two or more Games, and 11 in three. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum is listed for 1932, 1984 and 2028, as are the Rose Bowl and Exposition Park, the park around the Coliseum. The Melbourne Cricket Ground served in 1956 and 2000 and is listed for Brisbane 2032. Innsbruck's ski jump, speed skating oval, ice hall and sliding track served the Winter Games of 1964 and 1976 and the Youth Games of 2012. Reuse runs highest at the Winter Games: all 8 of Innsbruck 1976's venues had been or would be used by another Games.
Venues used by the most Games
Buildings listed in the categories of three or more Games, then those in two, oldest first (the top 15). Click a bar to see the venue on the map.
8 venues have served both a Summer and a Winter Games. Seven are in Beijing, where the Winter Games of 2022 went back to the Bird's Nest, the Water Cube and five more venues of 2008. The eighth is the Japanese resort town of Karuizawa, listed for both Tokyo 1964 and Nagano 1998. The Youth Olympics reuse heavily too: 27 of their venues had served a Summer or Winter Games, many of them in Innsbruck and Lillehammer.
For each of the 788 buildings and built sports grounds that served at least one Games already held, I looked for a clear statement of its fate: first in Wikidata (a demolition, closing or opening date, a state of use such as "permanently closed", or a type such as "destroyed building" or "temporary sports venue"), then in the opening paragraph of its Wikipedia article, using a short list of plain phrases ("was demolished", "was a temporary venue", "has been abandoned", "was converted into", "is a former") whose subject is the venue itself. Where neither source says anything clear, the fate is left unknown, and it is unknown for most: 444 venues, 56%, many of them because Wikipedia's text was only available for 40% of them.
What happened to the venues, by when they were first used
Built venues of Games held to 2026-11-02, by the year of the first Games each served. Left: all venues, with the unknown share. Right: the venues whose fate the sources state. Hover a block.
Among the 344 venues whose fate is stated, 241 (70%) are described as still standing and in use, often as the home of a football or ice hockey club. 56 (16%) have been demolished, 29 (8%) are closed, abandoned or described in the past tense, 16 (5%) were temporary venues taken down after their Games, and 2 were explicitly converted to another use. Age matters: of the venues first used before the Second World War whose fate is known, 46% are gone or closed; for 1948 to 1988 the figure is 34%, and for 1992 onwards 21%.
Demolitions keep coming. 40 of the 54 demolitions with a year in the sources happened in 2000 or later, a median of 28 years after the venue's last Games. London's White City Stadium of 1908 went in 1985 and the Wembley of 1948 in 2002; Tokyo's 1964 National Stadium was demolished in 2015; Atlanta lost the Omni and Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium in 1997 and the Georgia Dome in 2017. Abandonment is rarer but starker: the bobsleigh tracks of Sarajevo 1984 and Turin 2006 and the ski jumps on Mount Igman above Sarajevo are recorded as closed or abandoned, and Atlanta's Herndon Stadium, a 1996 venue, is described as abandoned.
Demolished and temporary venues
Every built venue the sources record as demolished or as a temporary venue, with the evidence. Click a row to see it on the map.
Temporary venues are a deliberate answer to the white elephant problem. Rome 1960 set up temporary shooting ranges, Tokyo 1964 a temporary velodrome and Beijing 2008 nine temporary venues, three of which have their own articles. London 2012's basketball arena was designed to be fully recyclable and was dismantled in January 2013, and Paris 2024 held judo and wrestling in the Grand Palais Éphémère, a temporary hall on the Champ de Mars. The Winter Games did the same with ceremony stadiums: Grenoble's in 1968, Albertville's in 1992 and Pyeongchang's in 2018 were each taken down within a year.
Each Games in numbers
Venues, how far they spread and what became of the buildings. Click a heading to sort and a row to see the Games on the map.
Venues. The 66 English Wikipedia categories "Venues of the YYYY Summer/Winter/Youth Olympics" hold 1,344 entries for 1,241 articles. I follow redirects, merge articles by Wikidata item (1,233 items), and drop 80 that are not venues by documented rules: each category's own list page and Games articles, athletes' villages and supporters' houses, media centres and a railway station, events such as the Henley Royal Regatta, and a ship. That leaves 1,153: 840 buildings and built sports grounds, 174 open air sites, and 139 towns, districts or campuses that Wikipedia lists as venues. Two links in the Sapporo 1972 category, to the Austrian village of Seefeld and its ski jump, 8,838 km away and used in 1964 and 1976, are treated as category errors. The Youth Olympics are kept separate in every count of "Games" above.
Games and places. Hosts, dates and continents come from Wikipedia's "List of Olympic Games host cities". A Games counts as held if its closing ceremony was on or before 2026-11-02. Coordinates are those of each Wikipedia article (90% have them); the middle of a Games is the median latitude and longitude of its venues, the same rule for every Games, and distances are great circle distances. Rivers, roads and canals (27 features) are mapped but left out of the distances, because their single coordinate is often far from the Olympic stretch.
Fates. Only buildings and built sports grounds are assessed. Wikidata comes first: a demolition or dissolution date (ignored if it is earlier than the venue's last Games, as for a railway station later used as an arena), a type of destroyed building or temporary venue, a closing date or a state of use; a venue that opened within two years before its last Games and was demolished within a year after it counts as temporary. Otherwise I read the first 1,500 characters of the Wikipedia article sentence by sentence, counting a demolition, closure or conversion only when its subject is the venue itself, not a predecessor, a neighbour or a stand. An article that describes a venue in the past tense ("was a football stadium") counts as closed or gone; one that describes it in the present tense as an existing venue counts as in use. Every classification keeps its evidence sentence, shown in the map's pop ups. These are conservative readings of what two sources say, not site visits: "in use" means the article describes a working venue, and the 444 unknowns are not a sample of the rest.