In the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens , the Greek flag led the parade , while the Greek team entered last , as the host nation ; Saint Lucia ( Αγία Λουκία in Greek ) then entered first . In the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona , both Spanish and Catalan were official languages of the games , but due to the political sensitivity surrounding the use of Catalan , the nations entered in French alphabetical order . For unknown reasons , all three games taking place in Japan had the nations enter in English alphabetical order instead of Japanese characters . In the 2008 Summer Olympics , teams were ordered by the number of strokes in the Chinese translation of the team name . In the 2010 Winter Olympics , teams entered in English alphabetical order , although the languages of the Olympics are also the languages of the host country , Canada , because English is the more dominant of the two in Vancouver and in the host province of British Columbia . In the 1980 Summer Olympics and the 2014 Winter Olympics , the countries entered in the Cyrillic alphabetical order , which is the Russian language 's official script
2010 Winter Olympics
2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremony
Olympic Games ceremony