City, Utah. Los Angeles will host the Summer Olympics for a third time in 2028, marking the ninth time the U.S. hosts the Olympic Games. The United States has won the most gold and overall medals in the Summer Olympic Games, even if the medal totals of the Soviet Union/CIS and Russia are combined, and has topped the medal table 18 times. The country has won the second most gold and overall medals in the Winter Olympic Games, behind Norway, but has topped the medal table only one time, in 1932. If all of Germany's and Russia's incarnations are combined, the United States slips to fourth in the all-time Winter Olympic Games table. Amateurism and professionalism The exclusion of professionals caused several controversies throughout the history of the modern Olympics. The 1912 Olympic pentathlon and decathlon champion Jim Thorpe was stripped of his medals when it was discovered that he had played semi-professional baseball before the Olympics. His medals were posthumously restored by the IOC in 1983 on compassionate grounds. The advent of the state-sponsored "full-time amateur athlete" of the Eastern Bloc countries eroded the ideology of the pure amateur, as it put the self-financed amateurs of the Western countries at a disadvantage. The Soviet Union entered teams of athletes who were all nominally students, soldiers, or working in a profession, but all of whom were in reality paid by the state to train on a full-time basis. The situation greatly disadvantaged American athletes, and was a major factor in the decline of American medal hauls in the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, the Olympics shifted away from amateurism, as envisioned by Pierre de Coubertin, to allowing participation of professional athletes, but only in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its influence within the International Olympic Committee. Individual sports Motorsports Major international competitions, such as the Formula One Grand Prix series and MotoGP are generally less popular in the United States than they are in the rest of the world. However, some Americans have achieved great success in these international series, such as Mario Andretti and Kenny Roberts. In the United States, the dominant form of auto racing is oval track racing, especially stock car racing, with other homegrown motorsports also having local popularity. Americans, like the rest of the world, initially began using public streets to host automobile races, but these venues were often