The Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee has presented the Competition Schedule for the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi. The Sochi 2014 Games will be held from 7 – 23 February 2013.
The Competition Schedule includes information about all the competitions taking place during the Games and also the Olympic Ice Hockey tournament table, approved by the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF).
The Sochi 2014 Games will take place over 17 days and feature 7 Olympic sports. In total, 98 medals will be awarded. During the Games in Sochi 6,000 Olympic athletes and team members from around 85 countries will come to the Games.
The Sochi 2014 Sports Program has set an Olympic record, both for the overall number of competitions taking place as well the number of new events included in the program.
In total, 12 events have been added to the Sochi Olympic Games Sports Program. As a result, the total number of events and medals in the program is 98, of which 29 will be held in the Coastal Cluster and 69 in Mountain cluster. That is 12 more than at the Vancouver 2010 Games and 14 times more than at the Turin 2006 Games.
The Games in Sochi has a record number of events added to the program, far more than Albertville (11 new events), Salt Lake City (10 new events), Turin (6 new events) and Vancouver (2 new events).
9 of the 12 new events in the Sochi 2014 Olympic Program will feature one of the most progressive sports - skiing.
In addition women will compete in ski jumping for the first time in Olympic history.
The number of competitions taking place at the Games popular among young people has significantly increased as 8 events in freestyle skiing and snowboard (4 in each discipline) have been added to the Olympic program including ski halfpipe, ski slopestyle, snowboard slopestyle and snowboard parallel slalom.
Team events have also been added to the Sochi 2014 Olympic Program in 3 disciplines: figure skating, bobsleigh (relay) and biathlon (mixed relay).
The Olympic Competition Schedule has been approved by International Sports Federations, the International Olympic Committee and the Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS), but may still undergo minor alterations. These can be followed on the official website of the Winter Games.
There are seven sports in the Olympic program. These are biathlon, bobsleigh, curling, skating, skiing, luge and ice hockey. Each of the sports is supervised by a separate international sports federation.
The next step of the program is the Olympic sports disciplines. There are 15 Olympic disciplines. There are disciplines where the name is that of the sport. These are biathlon, curling, luge and ice hockey. The remaining sports are split into the relevant disciplines. Thus, the skiing consists of six disciplines - Alpine skiing, Nordic combined, cross-country skiing, ski jumping, snowboard and freestyle skiing. Skating has three disciplines - speed skating, figure skating and short track. Finally, the bobsleigh includes two disciplines - skeleton and bobsleigh itself.
The number of sports and disciplines for inclusion in the Olympic program is determined 7 years before the Games (Olympic Charter). Thus, the sports and disciplines of the 2014 Games were determined by the IOC in 2007 at the IOC Executive Committee in Guatemala.
More recent changes concern the events. The number of events is fully consistent with the number of sets of medals, which will be contested at the Olympics - in Sochi there will be 98.
The Sochi 2014 Sports Program included 6 new events in April and the same amount in July 2011. The total amount of new added events in the Olympic program is 12. It is a record program increase in Olympic Winter Games history.
