London: third time around

    The XXX Summer Olympics start in London on July 27. The capital of the United Kingdom will become the first ever city to host the main sporting event for the third time. London first hosted the IV Olympic Games, the first games to be held after World War II. A total of 12,500 athletes from 205 countries are competing at the London Olympics 2012 for 302 sets of awards in 39 disciplines of 26 types of sport.

   It’s a history that goes back even further than the first London Olympics in 1908. British athletes competed at the first modern Olmpics in Athens in 1896, just as they have at every Games since – an honor no other nationality can claim.

   To find the true origin of the modern Olympic movyement, however, you need to go back still further, not to France or Athens, but to the unlikely setting of Much Wenlock in Shopshire. It was here that Dr. William Penny Brookes, the local GP and an enthusiastic advocate of physical education, founded the Wenlock Olympian Class in 1850. It became an annual competition and, from 1852, included athletic events alongside football, cricket and quoits. Within a decade, Brookes’ Games were attracting crowds of four or five thousand, and attention from overseas.
   Ukraine first participated at the Olympic Games as an independent nation in 1994, and has athletes to compete in every Summer Olympic Games and Winter Olympic Games since then. Ukraine is competing at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, United Kingdom from July 27 to August 12, 2012.

 Material in the article was taken from newspapers, which you can read in our department:

Kyiv Weekly. - 2012. - № 29-30. - P. 6-7.
Digest. - 2012. - № 14. - P. 2-3.