Johnald's Fantastical Daily Link Splurge

Olympic Venues Past, Present and Future as Seen From Space

Posted: 21 Feb 2010 09:00 PM PST

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The Olympics have been held in some of the most scenic locations on Earth, and this year is no exception. Some of the most breathtaking moments of the games involve details captured in photo finishes in cross country skiing and hooked ski tips leading to crashes in the slalom seen in slow-motion video. All that aside, Vancouver is equally breathtaking from above.

Vancouver beat out Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Salzburg, Austria, to host Canada's third Olympics. The city has delivered beautiful, sunny weather that is unfortunately too warm for ideal snow conditions, giving the grounds crews some major challenges. Snow has been trucked in for some of the events.

This gallery collects images taken from space by astronauts and satellite of a few of the more interesting and attractive Olympic host cities from 1900 to 2016.

Vancouver, British Columbia

The image above, taken by the Landsat-7 satellite in December, shows the entire Vancouver-Whistler area. The ski resort can be seen in the upper left corner of the image and in the closeup below. The next image below is an even closer look at Whistler taken by DigitalGlobe's WorldView-2 satellite. The next images are of Cypress Mountain, where the freestyle skiing and snowboarding events are being held, the first from Digital Globe and the last image from Landsat-7.

Click any image in this gallery for a higher-resolution version.