Five rings appear on the official Olympic flag.
The rings are interlocked and colored blue, yellow, black, green, and red on a white background. Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic movement, introduced the design in 1913, and the flag was first displayed at the 1920 Antwerp Games.
The five rings are widely understood to represent the union of the five inhabited parts of the world involved in the Olympic movement. The colors were chosen because every national flag in use at the time contained at least one of the six colors in the emblem, counting the white background.
A common mistake is to interpret the rings as representing five specific continents in a fixed color order. The Olympic movement does not officially assign each ring to a particular continent. The emblem is protected as an Olympic symbol and is governed by rules of the International Olympic Committee.