Tristan Hotham

Researcher of campaigns and platforms. Maker of other things.

After the Games: what happens to Olympic venues?

Title card reading 'After the Games' in black and red on pale paper, beside a world map of Olympic venues dotted green, red, amber, purple and grey, clustered in Europe, North America and East Asia. Text: 1,153 Olympic venues, 1896 to 2032, mapped; where the sources say, 70% still in use, 56 demolished, 16 taken down after the Games.

Every Olympics leaves a city full of stadiums, pools, rinks and ski jumps. I mapped all 1,153 venues that Wikipedia lists, from Athens 1896 to Brisbane 2032, and went looking for what became of them.

Explore the interactive map
Read the paper

Wikipedia keeps a category of venues for every Olympic Games: “Venues of the 1908 Summer Olympics”, “Venues of the 2026 Winter Olympics” and so on, 66 of them, Youth Olympics included. Put them together, match each article to Wikidata, and you get 1,153 places that hosted, or will host, an Olympic event, 1,038 of them with coordinates. That is the raw material for this map.

World map with a dot for every Olympic venue, clustered in Europe, the eastern and western United States, Japan, Korea, China and south eastern Australia, with single dots in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Senegal and Tahiti. Dots are coloured green for still in use, red for demolished, amber for closed, purple for temporary and grey where the sources do not say; grey is the most common colour
Every Olympic venue with coordinates, 1896 to 2032, coloured by what the sources say became of it.

Where the Games went

The map is heavily European. Of the 55 Summer and Winter Games held so far, 17 Summer and 15 Winter editions were in Europe, 58% of the total. North America has had 6 of each, Asia 4 of each, Oceania two Summer Games and South America one. No Winter Games has been held in the southern hemisphere, and the Youth Games in Dakar in 2026 are the first Olympics of any kind in Africa.

Horizontal bar chart of Olympic Games by host continent. Europe has 17 Summer, 15 Winter and 3 Youth Games plus one awarded; North America 6 Summer, 6 Winter and one awarded; Asia 4, 4 and 3 Youth; Oceania 2 Summer and one awarded; South America 1 Summer and 1 Youth; Africa only the Dakar Youth Games
Olympic Games by host continent.

The Games also got bigger. Athens in 1896 needed 7 venues; Summer Games since 1990 have averaged 38.9 in Wikipedia’s categories, and Paris 2024 used 45. Los Angeles has 49 listed for 2028.

Three bar charts of venues per Games over time. Summer Games rise from 7 in 1896 to between 26 and 45 since the 1990s, with the planned Los Angeles 2028 at 49. Winter Games rise from 3 in 1924 to between 14 and 20. The Youth Games held since 2010 have between 9 and 16
Venues per Games, split into buildings, open air sites and towns.

Compact cities, scattered mountains

How spread out is an Olympics? I took the middle of each Games’ venues and measured the distance to each one. For a typical Summer Games, half the venues are within 8.4 km of the middle, and that has hardly changed in a century. The exceptions are single events sent far away: Melbourne’s 1956 horse events went to Stockholm because of Australian quarantine laws, 15,597 km away, and Paris 2024’s surfing took place at Teahupoʻo in Tahiti, 15,724 km from the rest of the Games.

Chart with a dot for each Games showing the median distance of its venues from their middle on a logarithmic scale, and a tick for the farthest venue. Summer dots in red sit between about 2 and 25 km throughout. Winter dots in blue lie between 0.1 and 8 km before 1990 and rise to around 20 km, with Milan Cortina 2026 above 100 km. Long thin lines reach up to about 15,600 km for Melbourne 1956 and Paris 2024
Half of each Games’ venues lie within the dot’s distance of their middle; ticks mark the farthest venue.

The Winter Games are the real story. Until the 1980s they fitted inside one resort: half of St. Moritz’s 1928 venues were within 0.4 km of their middle, Lake Placid’s in 1932 within 0.1 km. Since 1990 hosts have paired a city for skating and hockey with distant mountains for skiing, and the typical figure has risen from 1.7 km to 18.9 km. Milan Cortina 2026 broke the scale: half its venues were more than 104 km from the middle.

Four square maps at the same scale, 380 km across. Athens 1896 is a tiny cluster near the coast, Lake Placid 1932 a single dot in the Adirondacks, Paris 2024 a tight cluster in the middle of northern France with outliers, and Milan Cortina 2026 a ring of scattered dots across northern Italy with a dashed circle more than 100 km wide
Four Games at the same scale. The dashed circle holds half of each Games’ venues.

Used again

88 venues appear in the lists of two or more Games. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Bowl are listed for 1932, 1984 and 2028; the Melbourne Cricket Ground for 1956, 2000 and 2032; Innsbruck’s ski jump, oval, ice hall and sliding track for 1964, 1976 and the Youth Games of 2012. 8 venues served both a Summer and a Winter Games: seven in Beijing, which went back to the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube in 2022, and the Japanese resort of Karuizawa.

Bar chart listing the buildings used by the most Games. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Rose Bowl have Los Angeles 1932, 1984 and 2028; the Melbourne Cricket Ground Melbourne 1956, Sydney 2000 and Brisbane 2032; four Innsbruck venues 1964, 1976 and the 2012 Youth Games; then venues used twice, from the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens to the Cresta Run in St. Moritz
Buildings listed for the most Games.

What became of them

This is where the sources run thin. For each of the 788 buildings and built sports grounds of past Games I looked for a clear statement in Wikidata (a demolition date, “permanently closed”, “temporary sports venue”) or in the first paragraph of its Wikipedia article (“was demolished”, “has been abandoned”, “was a temporary venue”), counting a sentence only when it is about the venue itself. That gives a fate for 344 of them, 44%. For the rest, the honest answer is that the sources do not say.

Among the venues with a stated fate, 70% are still in use, often as the home of a football or hockey club. 56 have been demolished, from London’s White City Stadium of 1908 (gone in 1985) to Tokyo’s 1964 National Stadium (2015) and Atlanta’s Georgia Dome (2017). 29 are closed, abandoned or described only in the past tense, among them the bobsleigh tracks of Sarajevo 1984 and Turin 2006. And 16 were temporary, built to be taken away, like London 2012’s basketball arena, dismantled in January 2013, and Paris 2024’s Grand Palais Éphémère.

Two sets of stacked bars for venues first used in 1896 to 1936, 1948 to 1988 and 1992 to 2026. Left, all venues: more than half of each bar is grey for unknown. Right, venues with a stated fate: the green in use share rises from 54% to 66% to 77% while the red demolished share falls from 26% to 21% to 10%
What happened to the venues, by when they were first used.

Of the venues first used before the Second World War whose fate is known, 46% are gone or closed. For those first used since 1992, 21%.

Age explains much of that: an arena that has stood for ninety years has had ninety years to be replaced. But demolitions keep coming. 40 of the 54 demolitions with a year in the sources happened since 2000, a median of 28 years after the venue’s last Games.

Caveats

This is Wikipedia’s list, not the IOC’s: venues without an article are missing, and some categories list a town or a park rather than a stadium. “Still in use” means the article describes a working venue, not that it is busy or paying its way. Most fates are unknown, and the known ones are probably skewed towards venues where something dramatic happened. The map lets you check every classification: click any dot to see the sentence it rests on.

Data: English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Wikidata (CC0); outlines from Natural Earth. The interactive map, paper, data and code are linked above; the code is on GitHub. I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results.

Tristan Hotham

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