IMAGES AND SOUND
Browse thousands of multimedia items from the Olympic Museum library
Most of the collections have been digitised, archived and documented. These images are available to IOC partners and the Olympic family for their projects, such as exhibitions organised by partner museums or research projects.
The IOC's Images & Sounds heritage is made up of three collections:
- The photographic collection
- The audiovisual collection
- The sound collection
Thanks to ambitious heritage conservation programmes launched in the early 2000s, our collections are now preserved in the best possible conditions. Our most cherished historical collections have been restored and preserved for future generations.
Photography
The photographic collections contain more than 900,000 images, with the first dating back to the Olympic Games Athens 1896.
The collections mainly document in particular:
- The competitions of the Olympic Games and Youth Olympic Games
- The behind-the-scenes operations and organisation of the Games
- The institutional activities of the IOC and its president
- The activities of the Olympic Museum
Most of the images in the collection are now digital, but there are also more than 2,000 important restored prints, 40 glass plates, around 20 historical albums and almost 1,300 postcards.
Audiovisual
Containing more than 58,000 hours of audiovisual content, the collection mainly consists of televised coverage of the Olympic Games and Olympic films.
The collection of Olympic films spans from 1900, with images of the city of Paris, to 2022, with the official film of the Beijing Winter Games. The historical scope of this heritage collection makes it unique among sports archives.
Some 15,000 items are stored at the Cinémathèque suisse and in other film archives around the world to ensure they are preserved in the right conditions for years to come.
In 1996, the IOC launched an ambitious programme to acquire and preserve Olympic films. After 20 years of painstaking research and restoration, 40 feature films, 60 short films, over 1,000 hours of rushes and several newsreel collections covering the period from 1900 to 1998 have joined our collections. And these collections continue to grow every year.
The television broadcast collection mainly comprises images of the Olympic Games from 1960 to 2024. Until the Olympic Games Beijing 2008, these images came from the host broadcasters. Since then, the images produced by the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) have been added directly to our collections in Lausanne.
The rest of the audiovisual collection includes images of the preparations for the Games and the Olympic torch relay, the institutional activities of the IOC and the Olympic Museum, and numerous interviews with Olympians.
Sounds
The IOC audio collection contains 8,900 hours of recordings, mainly of IOC institutional meetings, such as IOC Session meetings, press conferences and Olympic Congresses. They are testament to the rich institutional history of the IOC and are extremely helpful when it comes to drafting minutes of meetings.
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