What do you wear when the world is watching? That's the issue facing Olympic athletes required to strut their stuff in front of billions in the international spotlight of the Games. Athletes' first focus is on their skill, not their style.

Yet the Games have become ever more fashion-forward, with top designers taking over team uniforms and high-tech sport fabrics taking centre stage.

The Games have also launched fads and have been the source of some full-on fashion faux-pas. Here's a look at some of the top trends, first-place winners and last-place finishers we've seen on the Olympic runway over the years.

Couture creations

High-end designers, whether eager to share in the spirit of sport or to partake of free publicity, are increasingly influencing athletes' attire.

As early as the 1972 Games in Munich, French designer Andre Courreges was outfitting Olympic employees.

Starting in the 1990s, big name fashion icons like Vera Wang and Christian Lacroix have created costumes for Olympic figure skaters. Wang, a former competitive skater herself, has dressed Nancy Kerrigan and Michelle Kwan in outfits costing up to $13,000.

In Turin in 2006, Italian fashion icons Giorgio Armani, Roberto Cavalli and Moschino crafted costumes for the home team, while Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto decked out the French.

In Beijing in 2008, Ralph Lauren crafted the U.S. team's Opening Ceremonies preppy polo look, with navy blue blazers, white pants, striped ties and white caps -- a look some deemed reminiscent of Gilligan's Island.

Here in Vancouver, Canada's own designers Dan and Dean Caten, of Dsquared2, are outfitting entertainers at our 2010 ceremonies.

Wardrobe malfunctions

The Olympics is not the time to experience a wardrobe malfunction. Unfortunately, it happens. In Nagano in 1998, Canadian ice dancer Shae-Lynn Bourne's costume -- a low cut dress she wore for a pairs waltz routine -- slipped and left her exposed. The couple placed fourth, which might have helped ease her embarrassment.

Likewise, British bobsledder Gillian Cooke, who is competing at the 2010 Games, turned red after her body suit split at the back during the World Championships earlier this year, an accident broadcast on live TV.

On thin fashion ice

Of all the Winter Games sports, figure skating presents the most opportunities for creative expression in dress. But not all competitors come up with chic costumes. Men seem to beget the biggest bloopers.

France's bronze medallist Philippe Candeloro, who took to the ice in 2000, for instance, looked like a warrior from the film Braveheart, with blue face paint and kilt.

U.S. skater Johnny Weir took it too far in Turin in 2006 in a "swan" suit -- complete with faux feathers, fishnet and 8,000 rhinestones. Likewise, Switzerland's Stephane Lambiel got carried away with the animal theme that year and performed as an orange zebra.

Russia's Ilia Kulik appears to have started the animal-print trend in 1998 when he won a gold in a neon-yellow giraffe blouse. Earlier this year, Russian skater Maxim Shabalin and his partner Oksana Domnina were chastised in the press for their "Aboriginal-inspired" ensembles -- skin-toned body suits with red loincloths, accented by leaves and tribal markings. The pair have wisely ditched the duds before taking to the ice in Vancouver.

Fan favourites

Olympic events don't just set records, they set trends.

Canadian company Roots has been behind more than a few, starting with the Team Canada poor-boy cap in Nagano that was later worn by celebs like Puff Daddy, Prince William and Robin Williams.

Then came the Team USA beret from the 2002 Salt Lake City Games. Athletes and celebs alike again took a shine to the look, and Roots ended up selling a million berets.

So far, this year's biggest fashion fad for Vancouver 2010 fans has been HBC's red Olympic mittens. The $10 woolly warmers were nearly impossible to find a few months ago. But stores are back in stock and officials expect to sell at least three million of them before the Closing Ceremonies, with 1.5 million already sold. Another half-million official Team Canada toques, scarves and sweaters have flown off shelves.

Advanced apparel

Speedskating suits are a masterpiece of form and function. With aerodynamics in mind, they're designed to help shave mere fractions of a second off an athlete's time. To do it, the skin-tight suits use up to six different fabrics, including spandex, silk, even rubber. They're moulded to each athlete's contours and then tested in wind tunnels.

Similarly, the suits for Summer Games sports where seconds matter -- like swimming -- are high-tech wonders. In Beijing, Michael Phelps was wearing a controversial Speedo LZR Racer body suit, designed with help from NASA, when he won eight gold medals and set seven world records.

Too sexy for sports?

Who can forget the costumes -- or rather lack thereof -- of East Germany's Katarina Witt?

The gold-medal-winning figure skater's revealing "Carmen" costume at the 1988 Calgary Games prompted the sport's governing body (the International Skating Union) to introduce a new regulation dubbed "the Katarina rule." The regulation, which required women to wear costumes "covering the hips and posterior," was repealed in 2004.

Unworthy wardrobes

When it comes to a country's themed team uniforms, everyone, it seems, is a critic.

Canada caught flak in Calgary for our hokey get-ups, complete with white cowboy hats and fringed jackets. We missed the mark again in Beijing with the HBC-designed busy retro 1980s red-and-white prints adorning athletes' warm up gear. But we're far from the worst offenders. New Zealand's team, for instance, was mocked mercilessly in 2008, not for their understated uniforms, but for their footwear, from plastic clog-maker Crocs.

With Canadians basking in the glow of Olympic hockey glory — and still savouring Nova Scotia-born Sidney Crosby's overtime winner in Sunday's gold-medal match against the U.S. — two sports historians from Sweden have made a discovery that could cement the Maritime province's controversial claim to being the game's birthplace.

Researchers Patrick Houda and Carl Giden, members of the Canada-based Society for International Hockey Research (SIHR), have unearthed a brief reference to an 1811 ice game played with skates, sticks and a ball on the frozen surface of Pictou Harbour in north-central Nova Scotia.

Now comes the zinger: the original source and central figure of what may now be Canada's earliest documented account of a hockey game is a muscle-bound, 22-year-old Nova Scotian who defends his nation's honour in a dramatic showdown with an intimidating American visitor to this country.

Sound familiar?

Sid the Kid, meet fellow Bluenoser and sporting legend Hugh "The Big Deacon" McKay, who "was known to be the strongest man in the County of Pictou," Houda and Giden write in their soon-to-be published, online chronology of hockey history titled "Timeline: Stick and Ball Games."

A preview of the publication, made available to Canwest News Service on Tuesday, includes intriguing excerpts from a book written in 1895 by Nova Scotia historian Rev. Robert Grant.

Grant, a well-known chronicler of Pictou County's pioneer days, details a memorable encounter between McKay — born in Nova Scotia in 1789 to Scottish immigrants — and a "Yankee" named William Allan, who was staying at Lorraine's Hotel in Pictou in the winter of 1811 when he challenged any local man who had the courage to a wrestling match.

"When the Deacon was 22, there came to Pictou town a professed wrestler from the United States," Grant wrote in his East River Sketches, Historical and Biographical, With Reminiscences of Scottish Life.

"Everyone," Grant recounted, knew of McKay's "matchless strength. But would he try the Yankee?"

After meeting Allan at the hotel, McKay "went out and told his friends he had his mind made up to try him. It was mid-winter," Grant noted, and the match was arranged indoors in "a large building at the rear of the hotel, Mason hall. All around the hall was a row of benches and on these stood the spectators of the scene."

The Nova Scotian and the American squared off and "the highlander gained an easy victory," Grant wrote, before penning the passage that caught the attention of the Swedish hockey researchers.

"The assembled bluenoses, elate with joy, and proud of their youthful hero, for farther recreation repaired to the ice on the harbour to skate and play ball."

Then, after Allan requests a rematch with McKay, "nothing loath, skates and hurlies laid aside, there is another rush for the hall."

And there, according to Grant, McKay again forced Allan into submission and pressed him to acknowledge that the "better man" had won.

"Allan made the required acknowledgment, and the affair ended in peace and mutual good will," Grant states. "There have been various versions of this wrestling match. But the above is the true one. I had it from Deacon and I have used his very words."

Hurly, shinty and bandy were stick-and-ball field games played throughout the British Isles during the 1700s. They are widely seen by sports historians as the models for various hockey-like skating games that evolved on North America's plentiful natural ice surfaces in the early 1800s.

"Hurly," the sport apparently favoured in Nova Scotia, was both the name of the game and the name of the curved stick used to strike the ball.

But Grant's second-hand account of the celebratory sticks-and-skates game at Pictou in 1811 isn't likely to end the long-running debate over hockey's birthplace, which includes claims from Windsor, N.S., Deline, N.W.T. and Montreal.

The Kingston, Ont.,-based SIHR and the International Ice Hockey Federation have both declared Montreal the birthplace of modern hockey based on a detailed Montreal Gazette newspaper account of a game played in March 1875.

Deline's claim is based on an 1825 journal entry and letter written by John Franklin — the ill-fated British naval commander and Arctic explorer — who described how his men engaged in "hockey played on the ice" and skated on a frozen lake during an overland expedition to map Canada's Arctic coast.

The well-known birthplace claim by Windsor — located about 130 km west of Pictou on the Nova Scotia shore — derives from the fact-based but fictional reminiscences of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a famed 19th-century author who wrote humorous novels about the early years of colonial Nova Scotia.

Haliburton, who attended a Windsor boy's school in the first decade of the 1800s, appeared to be recalling genuine childhood memories when he described in an 1844 novel a scene in which "boys let out racin', yelpin', hollerin', and whoopin' like mad with pleasure" while playing "hurly on the long pond on the ice."

But a 2002 SIHR report that confirmed Montreal as the birthplace of organized hockey rejected the literary basis of the Windsor claim as too fragmentary and unreliable.

Although Grant was a historian, his reliance on Hugh McKay's recollections of the 1811 wrestling match and hurly game — many decades after they occurred — also lacks the authority of a newspaper article or other primary historical record.

But the account adds to a rich and growing body of anecdotal evidence that Nova Scotia was the seedbed of Canada's national winter game.

Last year, the Halifax-born "founding father" of modern hockey — James Creighton — was honoured with a gravesite memorial unveiled in Ottawa by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

While Creighton was a participant in and key organizer of the historic 1875 game in Montreal, historians believe he was instrumental in bringing knowledge of the rudimentary Nova Scotia game to Eastern Canada, where it was moved indoors and standardized with consistent rules and equipment.

Houda told Canwest News Service that he and Giden are completing the "most comprehensive study ever made" on the evolution of hockey and will soon make their 500-page volume more widely available.

In 2008, the Swedish researchers generated headlines across Canada after announcing the discovery of an 1839 document describing a hockey game on a frozen river near Niagara Falls, Ont. It remains the second-oldest known reference — after Franklin's 1825 letter — to "hockey" as an ice game.

"Our hope is to generate interesting and constructive discussions among hockey historians, journalists and the general public," Houda said. "We feel that our research might stimulate people to do their own research on this fascinating topic."