Switzerland has sent athletes to compete in every Games since it first participated at the Olympic Games at the inaugural 1896 Games. Switzerland boycotted the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, but the equestrian events for those Games were held in Stockholm, Sweden earlier that year, where the Swiss dressage team won a bronze medal.
Switzerland has hosted the Games twice, for the 1928 Winter Olympics and the 1948 Winter Olympics, both in St. Moritz.
Swiss athletes have won a total of 181 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, and another 127 at the Winter Olympic Games.
The National Olympic Committee for Switzerland was created and recognized in 1912.
Famous quotes containing the word switzerland:
“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!”
—Orson Welles (1915–84)