Bulgaria at the Summer Olympics
| Bulgaria at the Olympics |
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| IOC code | BUL | ||||||||
| NOC | Bulgarian Olympic Committee | ||||||||
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| Medals |
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Bulgaria first participated at the Olympic Games at the inaugural 1896 Games, with a single gymnast. However, since Charles Champaud was a Swiss national living in Sofia, some sources credit his appearance to Switzerland instead.
The Bulgarian Olympic Committee was created in 1923 and first sent a team to the Summer Olympic Games in 1924. The nation has participated in every Summer Games since then, except for 1932 (during the Great Depression), 1948 (after World War II), and 1984, when they participated in the Soviet-led boycott of the 1984 Summer Olympics. Bulgaria first participated in the Winter Olympic Games in 1936, and has attended every Winter Games since then.
Bulgarian athletes have won a total of 223 medals, with wrestling and weightlifting as the top medal-producing sports. After the fall of the communist regime in 1989-1990, in Bulgaria's turbulent transition to free-market democracy, top-notch state support for Bulgarian Olympians disintegrated. Diminishing and marginalized medal returns were evident in the 2012 London Olympics, where Bulgaria, a former top-10 Olympic power in the late 1980s, fell out of its original high stature. Bulgaria's all-time highest performance came in the 1980 Summer Olympics where they achieved bronze medals as the 3rd ranked team in the overall medal count. In the 1988 Summer Olympics Bulgaria ranked 7th, but achieved the nations most amount of medals in history. Their highest Winter Olympic result came in 1998 where they ranked 15th.
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