Sochi 2014 midpoint after eight days of competition

This is the midpoint of the Games in Sochi after eight days of competition.

The Athletes
• Participation by 88 National Olympic Committees – an Olympic Winter Games record • Six National Olympic Committees participating for the first time — Malta, Paraguay, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tonga and Zimbabwe • A record 2,856 athletes, more than 40 percent women • 44 of 98 events completed • Medals won by athletes from 26 countries • Five of 12 new events have debuted, including men’s and women’s ski and snowboard slopestyle, and women’s ski jumping

The Olympic Venues
• More than 1.2 million tickets sold • Olympic Park visitors at times in excess of 100,000 per day • More than 1.3 million athletes, spectators and other participants transported efficiently

Protecting Clean Athletes
• 1,799 doping tests conducted thus far in the most comprehensive doping detection process in the history of the Olympic Winter Games. None resulting in a competition ban • A record 2,453 tests planned for Sochi • Samples will be kept for 10 years for possible retesting, two years longer than at previous Games

The Broadcast Audience
• On track for record worldwide Olympic Winter Games coverage on television and on digital platforms – cumulative total of more than 88,000 hours • Potential audience of 4.1 billion worldwide • Games broadcast by a record number of TV channels (more than 300), including a record number of free-to-air channels (more than 200)

The Digital Audience
• Record global engagement for the Olympic Winter Games on the IOC’s website, Olympic.org — more than 6.3 million visits to the site • More web visitors in the first two days of Sochi 2014 than during the entire Vancouver 2012 Games • Record engagement through mobile platforms, with 43 percent of visitors on mobile phones or tablets

Connecting on Social Media
• Record social media engagement for any Games, winter or summer • More than 2.2 million new Olympic social media followers on all social networks in the first week of competition • More than 1 million new Facebook fans, bringing the total to 6.9 million • Facebook posts reaching as many as 17.6 million people per day as content is shared across networks • The IOC page on vk.com, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, is the most popular sports site on the Russian social network, with more than 2.7 million followers • More than 1,500 Sochi 2014 Olympians are connecting with fans and with each other on the IOC’s Athletes’ Hub, joining more than 4,500 Olympians from previous Games