A container, not a competition
The easiest mistake to make about the Olympics is to treat it as a single event with a single set of rules. It is closer to several dozen world championships booked into the same city in the same fortnight. Athletics, swimming, gymnastics, judo, sailing and the rest each arrive with their own rulebook, their own officials, their own qualification standards and their own idea of what a good performance looks like.
That structure explains most of what feels strange about following the Games. Two events on the same afternoon can use completely different tie-breaking methods, different appeal procedures and different definitions of a false start, because they were written by different federations decades apart and were never intended to match.
What the Games genuinely share is the calendar, the venues, the eligibility framework and the ceremony around them. Everything else is inherited from the sports themselves.
Who runs what
Each sport on the programme is governed by its international federation, which writes the rules, appoints the officials and sets the qualification pathway. The organising committee of the host city builds and operates the venues, runs the transport and accommodation, and assembles the timetable that fits every session into two weeks of daylight and broadcast slots.
National Olympic committees sit between the two: they select and enter the athletes their federations have qualified, and they are the bodies that appear in the medal table. An athlete does not qualify for the Games in the abstract — they earn a quota place, and the national committee decides who fills it, which is why a country can win a place and still leave a well-known name at home.
This division of labour is worth knowing because it tells you where a decision came from. A disputed score is a federation matter. A delayed session is an organising committee matter. A selection controversy is almost always a national one.
Why the fortnight is the smallest part of it
By the time the opening ceremony happens, the field in most sports has been fixed for months. Quota places were won at continental championships, world cup circuits, ranking cut-offs and dedicated qualifying tournaments, some of them years earlier. A team that peaked at the wrong moment in that cycle is not in the building at all, however good it looks by the summer.
The compressed schedule then does something no league season does: it removes the chance to recover. A swimmer with one bad start, a gymnast with one landing, a sailor with one protest lost — none of them get the equivalent of next weekend's fixture. This is why Olympic results and season-long form so often disagree, and why treating a single Games as a definitive ranking of ability is usually a misreading.
It also changes how the event should be read afterwards. The honest summary of a Games is a list of what happened in specific finals, not a verdict on which nation is best at sport.