What do the five Olympic rings stand for?
Pierre de Coubertin's emblem is often said to match continents, though the official wording is less specific.
Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic movement, designed the interlaced rings in 1913, and they were presented publicly that year. The five rings, blue, yellow, black, green and red, sit on a white field. Together with the white background, Coubertin wrote, the six colors could reproduce the colors of every national flag then in existence, so the symbol was meant to be universal rather than tied to any region.
The rings stand for the five inhabited continents joined by Olympism: Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania. The Americas are counted as a single unit, and Antarctica, with no permanent population, is not represented. A popular belief assigns one color to each continent, such as yellow to Asia, but the IOC states that no such link was intended, and the colors have no continental meaning.
The flag bearing the rings was approved in 1914 but flew for the first time at the 1920 Games in Antwerp, because World War I intervened. The rings have been used on the flag at every Games since then, and the IOC treats the design as a registered emblem of the movement. The original sketch from 1913 was drawn by Coubertin by hand, and the symbol has kept its basic form ever since.