The number varies depending on the committees who qualify teams. A committee may represent an entire country or an autonomous (usually overseas) region within a country.
For the Summer Olympics of 2012 (London), there were 204 participating committees representing about 195 countries, plus 2 more locales that had no committees (Netherlands Antilles and South Sudan)
For the Winter Olympics of 2014 (Sochi, Russia), there were a record 88 participating committees.
Currently there are approximately 200 countries attending the Olympics.
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