Page 45 - Olympism in Socialism

Games in 1936, and has attended every Winter
Games since then.
Bulgarian athletes have won a total of 224
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 best performance
to date has come in the 1980 Summer Olympics
where they finished third in the overall medal
count. In the 1988 Summer Olympics Bulgaria
ranked 7th, but won the nation's largest total of
medals to date. The best Winter Olympic result
came in 1998 where they ranked 15th.

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