The United States of America has sent athletes to every celebration of the modern Olympic Games with the exception of the 1980 Summer Olympics, during which it led a boycott. The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) is the National Olympic Committee for the United States.

From 1896 to 2018 inclusive, U.S. athletes have won a total of 2,522 medals (1,022 of them gold) at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other nation, and another 305 at the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.

The United States Olympic team remains the only in the world to receive no government funding.[1]

Hosted Games [ edit ]

The United States has hosted the Games on eight occasions, more than any other nation, and is planning to host the ninth:

Medal tables [ edit ]

Red border color indicates host nation status.

Flagbearers [ edit ]

Amateurism and professionalism [ edit ]

The exclusion of professionals caused several controversies throughout the history of the modern Olympics. The 1912 Olympic pentathlon and decathlon champion Jim Thorpe was stripped of his medals when it was discovered that he had played semi-professional baseball before the Olympics. His medals were posthumously restored by the IOC in 1983 on compassionate grounds.[4]

The advent of the state-sponsored "full-time amateur athlete" of the Eastern Bloc countries eroded the ideology of the pure amateur, as it put the self-financed amateurs of the Western countries at a disadvantage. The Soviet Union entered teams of athletes who were all nominally students, soldiers, or working in a profession, but all of whom were in reality paid by the state to train on a full-time basis.[5][6][6] As a result, the Olympics has shifted away from pure amateurism, as envisioned by Pierre de Coubertin, to allowing participation of professional athletes.

See also [ edit ]