Three Decades Before Its Own Federation: The Asian Games Before the OCA

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

New Delhi hosted the first Asian Games in 1951 under the Asian Games Federation, a body formed specifically to run the new continental competition in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War and the independence of several of the founding nations. That federation kept the Games running across the 1950s, 1960s and into the early 1980s, building a genuine multi decade tradition of continental competition well before the organization that governs the Games today existed.

The Olympic Council of Asia replaced the Asian Games Federation in 1982, established in New Delhi, the same city where the whole tradition had started thirty one years earlier, with thirty four founding National Olympic Committees. The OCA's first Games under its own charter, fittingly, were also held in New Delhi that same year, closing a loop that had opened three decades before with a different governing body running the show.