7 Olympic Venues You Can Still Visit

For the 1972 Summer Games, Munich undertook a bold experiment in urban planning by building a sports and residential complex to serve the city’s needs not just for the duration of the Olympics but also for the future. Built upon the rubble of World War II using modern materials, the unified Olympiapark remains a vibrant destination for locals and tourists. The park’s focal piece, the main stadium, is ringed by a lightweight and light-permeable canopy roof made of acrylic-glass panels stretched across cable netting into organic forms that mimic alpine foothills. (Visitors can take tours of the stadium roof with the option of a zip-line descent.)

As planned from the start, the pedestrian-forward Olympic Village was converted into a residential district and student housing after the Games. The stadium, which hosted a memorial service to honor the Munich Massacre victims abducted in the athletes’ village 11 days into competition, was the home soccer pitch for FC Bayern Munich until 2005 and is still regularly used for concerts and sporting events.

In its space-age designs for the Olympic Park, Montreal truly embraced the future. Between the flattened twin pyramids of the Olympic Village, the Olympic Stadium with a proposed retractable roof and the 45-degree inclined tower looming overhead, the 1976 Summer Games host city went big design-wise. Unfortunately, construction on the tower and the stadium’s retractable roof ran into significant cost overruns and other delays, so it was not finished in time for the Games. The partially completed round stadium, dubbed the Big O, worked just fine, though, serving as the stage for world records set by U.S. track stars Caitlyn Jenner and Edwin Moses.

Post-Games, the retractable roof has continued to be a problem and was unsuccessfully replaced with a Kevlar then a Teflon-fiberglass cover. Work is underway to add a permanent roof to the Big O, which also goes by the cheekier nickname the “Big Owe.” The Olympic Tower, now called Montreal Tower and still the world’s tallest inclined tower, was reopened as office space in 2020. Additional renovations to shore up and expand the tower’s tourist attractions are ongoing.

Television transmitters never looked so good. The elegant design for the Montjuïc Communications Tower was architect Santiago Calatrava’s winning entry in a competition held by the telecommunications company Telefónica in the lead-up to the 1992 Summer Games in Spain. The eye-catching 446-foot-tall white structure was erected high on Montjuïc, a hillside neighborhood above Barcelona, making the tower a visual beacon for the Games. Its deceptively simple design features a semicircle suspended near the top and an upright needle rising from its center that appears to float without support. The angle of the tilted leg matches the angle of the sun at the summer solstice, lending the tower a sort of primal place on the Barcelona skyline. The base of the tower is paved with broken tiles, an homage to Catalan modernist architect Antoni Gaudi, who used broken tile mosaics in his design for Barcelona’s Park Güell. For the tower, the tiles are all white, Calatrava’s signature color.

In 1990, Atlanta was tapped to host the 1996 Summer Games, marking the 100th anniversary of the modern Olympics. Keeping construction costs and ambitious reuse plans in mind, the host committee entered agreements with the Atlanta Braves baseball team (to take over the stadium after the Games) as well as Georgia Tech and Georgia State University (for the Olympic Village to become student dormitories). In an audacious move, the committee also cleared more than 21 acres of downtown land with increasingly rundown commercial buildings, warehouses and public housing to create Centennial Olympic Park.

During the Games, the park was a central hub of activity, drawing crowds to its viewing tents, stages and public art. (It was also the site of a pipe bomb attack that killed one woman and injured more than 100 bystanders.) In the years since those Games, Atlanta has maintained, upgraded and expanded Centennial Park so that it remains a vibrant destination for tourists and locals, with regularly scheduled concerts and festivals.

Held two years before the economic crash of 2008, the Winter Games in Turin, Italy, offered the industrial city in the foothills of the Italian Alps a chance to rebrand as a vibrant modern metropolis. Alas, some of the structures built for the Olympics, outside of sporting venues that could be repurposed for professional sports and concerts, fell into disrepair soon after the Olympians left town. The Olympic Village, unsuccessfully marketed as a new residential district in the failing economy, eventually became informal housing for refugees. A historic marketplace, ambitiously renovated for the Games, failed and was abandoned.

The remaining, soaring symbol of the city’s aspirations for the transformative impact of the Games is a dynamically tilted red arch, supporting a minimal pedestrian bridge that links the former Olympic Village and the Lingotto, the site of an old Fiat factory that was redesigned into a lively mixed-use neighborhood beginning in the 1980s. The lean but muscular design of the arch, tilted forward, successfully captures the athletic motion of Olympic competitors.

Arguably the most memorable building constructed for the Olympics, the arena nicknamed the Bird’s Nest was designed by Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei and prominent Chinese architect Li Xinggang. Maxwell Rutman, of Burns & McDonnell, says commissioning the striking building was a show of Beijing’s “modern prosperity.”

More than 22 miles of steel beams crisscross Beijing National Stadium’s exterior and translucent plastic panels span the angular spaces between beams, admitting light into its interior. The stadium is the world’s largest steel structure, yet architect Marc Perrotta says the loosely woven beams lend the “beautiful, stable shape…a kind of dynamic presence that you otherwise wouldn’t have in a building that large.” The opening and closing ceremonies for the Beijing Summer Olympics took place here, as did track and field competitions and the gold medal soccer matches.

In the years since, the Bird’s Nest has become a popular tourist destination. It was also the venue for the 2022 Beijing Winter Games’ opening and closing ceremonies, making it the world’s first stadium to host the events for both the Winter and Summer Olympics.

The athletic competitions at the 2010 Winter Games in Canada were split between events held at sea level in Vancouver and those held in the Coastal Mountains at Whistler. Down in Vancouver, the 31-foot-tall Olympic Cauldron rises on a plaza beside the Coal Harbour Seawall, adjacent to the city’s busy convention center and active cruise port, and remains a focal point in the city, though it is only lit on rare occasions. The cauldron’s four angular columns, each topped with a flame, balance against one another like logs on a campfire and support a central flame. When lit, the flames look as though they are emerging from spears of ice thanks to the glass panels encasing the steel columns. Post-Games, a reflecting pool was installed beneath the cauldron to help prevent vandalism and climbing.