How the Olympic Village Has Evolved: Photos

During the ancient Olympic Games, athletes from all over Greece arrived in Elis, on Greece’s Peloponnese peninsula, a month early to train and live together. This communal period, along with the competition itself, created the allure of the Olympics, an event focused on athletics that also holds virtues like peace and fairness in high esteem.

When the Games were revived for the modern era in 1896, athletes from 14 countries arrived in Athens, but each country’s organizer had to arrange and pay for their team’s accommodations in hostels, military barracks, hotels, private homes and even onboard the ships that brought them to Greece.

Then, in the run up to the 1924 Paris Summer Games, the rules of the Olympic charter changed to specify that the host country must provide affordable accommodations and food to the athletes, with the athletes’ home country paying their way. The concept of the modern Olympic Village was planted; its evolution over time has had an impact on host locales long after the competitions end.

In deference to the new athlete housing rules, Paris mustered wooden huts designed to sleep three people each as well services that included a post office, dining halls and a barbershop in time for the Games, according to a 2017 report from The Olympic Studies Centre on past athlete accommodations. The temporary village was dismantled immediately then eventually built over.

By 1932, with the Depression in full swing, the idea of an Olympic Village with affordable accommodations and brimming with wholesome camaraderie had fully taken hold. Los Angeles, host of that year’s Summer Games, was a still-young metropolis with lots of open land. The city erected 500 simple houses, each to hold four athletes, in what is now the Baldwin Hills neighborhood. The wide streets of the fenced-off village included multiple bathhouses and 31 dining halls as well as administrative buildings offering many of the same services as at the Paris Olympics. But more amenities and comforts were offered: a dentist, a hospital, an amphitheater and a public hall in which athletes could meet with journalists and visitors. Although women were welcome in this hall, the host committee thought it proper to house female Olympians at a hotel about six miles away.

Not long after the 1932 closing ceremony, there was little left of the Los Angeles Olympic Village. Some of the small houses were sold and transported elsewhere; one was moved to the city’s Mexican heritage area, Olvera Street, where it was converted into longstanding gift store. A few of the purchased houses were shipped off to Berlin and Tokyo, the sites of upcoming Olympics, to serve as inspiration for their own athletes’ villages. (Japan later withdrew its bid to host the 1940 Summer Games before the competition was cancelled ahead of World War II.) The remaining structures from L.A.’s Olympic Village were dismantled so the building materials could be auctioned off.

With each successive Olympics, the villages evolved. Paris’ rustic huts gave way to architectural wonders that showcased futuristic dreams. If the inclusion of a hospital in the 1932 Olympic Village signaled progress, the ultramodern pyramids of the 1976 Montreal Olympic Village and the laser-tag arena when Atlanta hosted in 1996 revealed aspirations for an exciting future almost within reach of mere mortals.

Other village upgrades reflected changes in society, as in 1956 when women’s housing was finally included in the Olympic Village in Melbourne, Australia. The next big step for women came in the 1984 Los Angles Games, when female athletes weren’t segregated in their own tower or in an often fenced-off area of the village. Instead, women were housed in rooms alongside those of the rest of their national team.

Although social halls and live musical performances had been a part of Olympic Village culture for decades, the 1976 Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria, incorporated a discotheque and a casino into the design of its leisure center for athletes. At the 1998 Nagano Games in Japan, a photo booth that created stickers was a huge hit with village residents who took lots of shots with their new friends and competitors. Each new edition of the Games seems to bring new distractions for the athletes: At the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Games, a DJ is playing regular sets at the athletes’ village.

Tony Sainsbury has been involved in the planning and logistics of Olympic Villages since 1998, when he began preparation for the 2000 Sydney Games. His process includes consulting the IOC Athletes’ Commission, a group comprised of current and recent Olympic participants who have advised him on their experiences and their must-haves. “Needs change,” he says. “In my day, we didn’t have ice baths for recovery, but now we have to provide those for the athletes.” At the 2012 London Games, the ice baths became a favorite photo op that athletes shared on social media.

In Beijing, another modification to Olympic Village life reflected the world beyond sports. The Chinese capital hosted the 2022 Winter Games when COVID-19 infections posed a serious threat to the competition (and the world). At one of the village’s dining facilities, athletes waited for their food to be delivered via a robotic system involving overhead tracks and cables that lowered dishes to tables without human contact. The tables, too, further isolated the diners with plexiglass dividers. This time, the Olympic spirit of mingling with athletes from different countries took a back seat to health and safety concerns.

Since 1936, nearly all new-build Olympic Villages have been designed to last. Even without today’s environmental concerns, the waste of building structures for a few weeks’ use during the Olympics and Paralympics drove host cities to begin building housing with the intention of conversion to other uses.

Residential housing is the most common conversions for Olympic Village accommodations, but some host cities have chosen to convert the spaces into housing specifically for seniors or students. As the organizers of the 2026 Winter Olympics have done in Milan, cities like Athens (2004), Montreal (1976) and Paris (2024) chose to build their Olympic Villages in underpopulated or industrial neighborhoods to sow the seeds of new neighborhoods.

The results are not always a success. In the case of Athens, the carefully designed village was primed to become an in-demand residential area thanks to its attractive variety of buildings, avenues, courtyards and pedestrian alleys but, according to The Olympic Studies Centre’s report, failed to provide the infrastructure of schools, hospitals and other services that a permanent, functional neighborhood would need to thrive. The athletes’ village built for the 2006 Turin Winter Games in Italy was also intended for a second life as sought-after housing but, against the backdrop of the 2008 global economic downturn, wasn’t successful. It instead became makeshift housing for new immigrants to Turin.

Tony Sainsbury attributes these kinds of failures to oversights in the planning process, particularly when the host committee and the developers who plan to inherit a village don’t adequately consider accessibility and infrastructure needs upfront. “Games needs and legacy needs are complimentary,” he says.

Some cities have found creative ways to avoid a glut of housing. The tiny ski village of Lillehammer, Norway, which hosted the 1994 Winter Olympics, did not need all the housing that athletes at those Games required, so only 185 houses constructed were permanent, according to The Olympic Studies Centre. Another 50 houses were built with the intention of exporting them to Sweden and elsewhere in Norway after the Games.

Other budget-minded host cities choose to piggyback on, and sometimes expand, existing university housing. The Olympic Village at the 1996 Atlanta Games took over Georgia Tech dormitories and added some buildings that blended in with the campus architecture. When the Games returned to Los Angeles in 1984, the Olympic Village was split between existing dormitories at the University of California Los Angeles and the University of Southern California; temporary design modifications like colorful kiosks and banners identified them as athlete housing.

Some post-Games uses of Olympic Villages are unusual outliers. The compound erected outside Berlin for the 1936 Olympics—which Hitler had dubbed the “village of peace”—became a training academy and hospital for Nazi soldiers during World War II, then refugee housing and later a Soviet Union army barracks for more than four decades. Lake Placid, New York, was the site of the 1980 Winter Games and the famous “Miracle on Ice” hockey game. The five grimly institutional dormitory buildings that were funded by the U.S. government reopened six months after the closing ceremony as the five cell blocks of the then-new Federal Correctional Institute Ray Brook. (The Village’s disco and sauna did not survive the transition to prison.)

Whether the facilities skewed amenity-rich or prison-grim, had long afterlives or not, Olympic Villages share one thing in common. They become enclaves where like-minded, elite athletes can find camaraderie—and an abundance of the Olympic spirit.