Syracuse

The Youth Olympic Games (YOG) are a high-level sports event open to teenagers between the ages of 15 and 18. The proposal to create the YOG – an initiative led by then-IOC President Jacques Rogge – was approved in 2007 by the IOC Session, and the first ever edition took place three years later in 2010, in Singapore.

The Summer YOG are held during the year of the Olympic Winter Games, and vice-versa for the Winter YOG. The next edition of the Summer YOG, initially planned in 2022, will take place in Dakar (Senegal) in October 2026, while the next Winter YOG will be held in Gangwon (Republic of Korea) in January 2024, benefiting from many of the facilities used for the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018. The YOG are required to adhere to the concept of sustainable development; in principle, no infrastructure should be built specifically to host the Games, unless a positive legacy can be guaranteed.

The goal of this event is to support young athletes from around the world in their career development, and to encourage them to live their lives in accordance with the Olympic values. In this respect, unlike other sports events, the YOG are centred on a “Compete, Learn & Share” experience that is delivered in a purpose-driven sports festival format. The YOG strive to reach and engage with as many young people as possible by integrating sport with educational and cultural activities. That’s why you will find various titles that present the importance of the educational activities at the YOG, including the Lausanne 2020 Athlete365 Education Programme, which introduces all the activities held for the athletes.

As far as the competitions themselves are concerned, the YOG are unique insofar as they are open to innovation from the International Sports Federations, which can propose new events and try new competition formats. The YOG can even include sports that are not on the Olympic Games programme. To understand these multiple changes and innovations, see the sports explanatory booklets published on the occasion of the Summer YOG Buenos Aires 2018 and the Winter YOG Lausanne 2020.

It is also worth noting that the Olympic Movement leverages the YOG to use them as a testing ground for innovation in event delivery. As an example, during Lausanne 2020, transport services relied fully on the use of public transport, allowing for more sustainability.

For information about the qualification system and the athletes who have competed in previous editions of the YOG, the list of relevant pages from International Sports Federation websites might be useful.

Finally, we invite you to read the factsheets, which will help you better understand how, with each edition, the concept of the YOG has evolved in order to meet the needs of the young athletes, the organisers, the host city and the Olympic Movement stakeholders.

On this ZOOM-IN page, we have compiled a list of the most relevant publications for you to facilitate your research on this unique event; an event which has clearly found its place as a distinctive topic of research.

As this is just a selection of the material available on the Olympic World Library, be sure not to miss the full list of publications on the topic of the Youth Olympic Games at the bottom of the page.