How Flags Work at the Olympics

The five interlocking rings were designed by Pierre de Coubertin, the driving force behind the modern Olympic movement, and presented publicly in 1913. The popular explanation — that the rings stand for the five inhabited continents — isn't what actually drove the color choices; de Coubertin instead ran a kind of palette audit, picking blue, yellow, black, green, and red against a white field specifically because, between the five ring colors and the white background, every competing country's own flag already contained a match.

The flag was first flown at the Games at Antwerp in 1920, and it's formally handed from the mayor of the outgoing host city to the mayor of the next host city during the Closing Ceremony — a specific, recurring handover ritual known as the Antwerp Ceremony, distinct from any individual country's own flag protocol.

Teams enter the Opening Ceremony in alphabetical order according to the host country's own language and alphabet, which is why the exact sequence looks different at every Games depending on where they're held. Two positions are fixed regardless of alphabet: Greece enters first, honoring the country as the birthplace of the ancient Olympics, and the host nation's own team enters last, as the ceremonial culmination of the parade.

Each team's flag bearer is typically selected by that country's own Olympic committee, often as a specific honor for a veteran or highly decorated athlete, and some countries have introduced dual flag bearers (one man, one woman) in more recent Games as part of a broader gender-parity push across Olympic ceremonies.

The IOC has repeatedly had to decide what happens when an athlete or team's national flag is barred for political reasons rather than simple non-recognition. Individual athletes from countries suspended or sanctioned by the IOC have, in various past Games, competed under the Olympic flag itself rather than their national flag, with no national anthem played if they win — a compromise that lets qualified athletes compete while withholding the specific symbolic recognition tied to their state.

The Refugee Olympic Team, introduced at the 2016 Rio Games, is a separate and newer case: athletes with no country able or willing to field them competitively march and compete under the Olympic flag itself, a use of the Olympic flag as a genuine substitute national symbol rather than just a ceremonial object.

Since a set of agreements reached in 1979 (commonly called the Nagoya Resolution), Taiwan's Olympic team has competed under the name 'Chinese Taipei,' using a specially designed flag — distinct from Taiwan's own Republic of China flag — that omits the elements China's government objected to, alongside a specific Olympic-anthem substitute rather than Taiwan's national anthem. It's one of the clearest, longest-running examples in the sports world of a flag being deliberately engineered as a diplomatic compromise rather than as a genuine national symbol chosen by the country it represents.

At medal ceremonies, the flags of the gold, silver, and bronze medalists' countries (or Olympic flag substitutes, per the rules above) are raised together, with the gold medalist's flag positioned highest and centered, timed to rise as that country's national anthem plays. This is, in a real sense, the moment the entire apparatus of Olympic flag protocol exists to produce — a scripted, camera-ready instant where a flag's rise is deliberately synchronized to carry maximum symbolic weight for a global audience.

At the Olympics, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland compete together as a single Great Britain (or Team GB) delegation under the Union Jack, even though those same four nations compete entirely separately, under their own individual flags, at the Commonwealth Games — a genuinely different flag-and-team structure for the same athletes depending on which competition they're in. This split exists because Olympic eligibility is organized around National Olympic Committees, of which there is only one for the United Kingdom, while the Commonwealth Games structure recognizes the Home Nations as separate competing entities in their own right.

The distinction occasionally surfaces publicly around football specifically, since FIFA has historically been cautious about a unified Great Britain team competing at the Olympics, worried that fielding one combined UK team might be used to argue the four national football associations (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) should be merged into one for World Cup and other FIFA competition purposes as well — a case where flag and team structure has real, documented political stakes beyond the Games themselves.