The Closing Ceremony will take place on 1 February. The opening day will also feature the traditional athletes' parade, marking the end of the Gangwon 2024 Torch Relay and the lighting of the Youth Olympic cauldron. The world's best winter athletes will then compete for 81 Olympic titles. 

In South Korea, the Gangwon 2024 Games will feature gender parity with 15 disciplines in seven sports. The participation of young people goes beyond sport as they seek a culturally and socially enriching experience beyond the sporting results, which are important but not the only focus. The Games will see the participation of around 1,900 athletes from around the world, a record number that reflects the growing interest and diversity in winter sports.

The last Games in Lausanne, the home of the IOC, attracted 1788 athletes, a number that will be surpassed by the first Youth Games in Asia. These fourth Youth Olympic Games will be the first to be held outside the traditional venues of Innsbruck, Lillehammer or Lausanne, and the first in history to be held outside European territory. 

While bid names are usually associated with a city rather than a province, this time the International Olympic Committee (IOC) respected the organisers' wish to keep the name of the province, as the event would be celebrated together with North Korea, a country with which they share a history but have been formally separated since 1945 after the Second World War. In an attempt to bring the countries closer, the South Korean governor of Gangwon, Choi Moon-soon, actively supported the project and insisted that the event should be held on both sides of the border.

The world-class infrastructure is a legacy of the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics and was a key factor in the selection process, which followed the IOC's guidelines for increasingly sustainable Games by utilising pre-existing venues in two main blocks: outdoor mountain events at the Alpensia Sports Park in PyeongChang, and indoor events on ice rinks in Gangneung.

The major sporting events will take place in these two main groups of venues. The PyeongChang Mountain group will host bobsleigh, skeleton, luge, biathlon, cross-country skiing, Nordic combined, ski jumping, alpine skiing, freestyle skiing and snowboarding. Meanwhile, Gangneung will host speed skating, short-track speed skating, figure skating, ice hockey and curling.

Sports disciplines:

The Gangwon 2024 Youth Olympic Games will feature gender equality in 15 disciplines across seven sports, including biathlon, bobsleigh (including skeleton), curling, ice hockey, luge, ice skating (including figure skating, short track and speed skating) and skiing (including alpine skiing, cross-country skiing, freestyle skiing, Nordic combined, ski jumping, and snowboarding).

How to watch Gangwon 2024:

You can watch live on the Olympic Channel via Olympics.com and the official website's mobile app, with full replays of every session and highlights.