BBC Documentaries

Dan Snow's History of the Winter Olympics (2014x20)

: 30, 2014

Historian Dan Snow looks back at 90 years of the Winter Olympics and shows how the political upheaval of the 20th and 21st century had an impact on the Games. Dan embarks on an epic journey across nine countries meeting some of the key people who helped shape the Winter Games. He tells the disturbing story of the Winter Olympics in Nazi Germany, the tense Olympic rivalry between East and West during the cold war, ending with the Miracle on Ice and the unforgettable, emotional Olympics in Sarajevo. Sarajevo was a city that in 1984 chimed to the music of Bolero - Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean reminisce about their performance as if it was a dream. Just eight years later most of the Olympic sites were destroyed during the civil war. Dan completes his journey in a little known Swiss village of Mürren where the blue riband event of the Winter Olympics, Alpine skiing, was first organised by a British man, Arnold Lunn. Did the British really invent the Winter Olympics? Not quite, but it is true that the British played and extraordinary role.