The archives captured some of the most iconic, and curious, moments in Olympic history, from pictures of the first modern-era games in Athens in 1896 to a sack race in St. Louis, Missouri eight years later. Sitting in a basement at the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) headquarters in Lausanne, some 33,000 hours of video, 500,000 pictures and 2,000 documents among other archives risked decay and being lost forever. But after a seven-year and 30 million euro ($33 million USD) conservation project involving experts from across the globe, the IOC has rescued much of its precious audiovisual archive. ‘There was an urgency to save this legacy,’ said Philippe Laurens, an official with the IOC’s Patrimonial Assets Management (PAM) programme, which spearheaded

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