Olympic football

The Olympic games in Berlin are about to start, and football is one of the sports where the country's will be competing.
The history of olympic football has always been rather awkward, and still today, the position of olympic history is very strange: something in between a semi-youth tournament supplemented with some star players.
For the first Olympic games, when there was no world cup, the Olympics were considered like the world cup, dominated by Europeans. This was just until unknown Uruguay in 1924 blew all Europeans away, and the groundwork was laid for the first world cup in 1930 in Uruguay. Then, for many years, olympic football became the ground of amateurs, dominated by Eastern Europeans, who had "state amateurs".
In general, it was a bore, and no competition with the World Cup: one can also see this in relation to countries that were the best in the world, were not to be seen in the Olympics: Brazil, England, West Germany, Argentina... (with only possible exception of some Eastern European countries).
Over the last years this has started to change, and the allowing of new players has made the tournament a bit more interesting, although some participating nations still only show off with a secondary youth team.
The great exceptions for these Olympics in Beijing are Brazil and Argentina. Argentina are defending champions from 2004, and Brazil is keen on winning its first gold ever in football. They therefore have shown up with very strong teams, and are by far the favourites to win the whole thing.
Nevertheles, because olympic football is such a bore, one doesn't know what may happen. However, I may add that it is not really worth bothering with games in the first rounds, until the semi-finals, unless you are from one of the countries playing.

Olympics	Gold	Silver	Bronze
1900 Paris	Great Britain	France	Belgium
1904 St. Loius	Canada	United States
1908 London	Great Britain	Denmark	Netherlands
1912 Stockholm	Great Britain	Denmark	Netherlands
1920 Antwerpen	Belgium	Spain	Netherlands
1924 Paris	Uruguay	Switzerland	Sweden
1928 Amsterdam	Uruguay	Argentina	Italy
1936 Berlin	Italy	Austria	Norway
1948 London	Sweden	Yugoslavia	Denmark
1952 Helsinki	Hungary	Yugoslavia	Sweden
1956 Melbourne	USSR	Yugoslavia	Bulgaria
1960 Rome	Yugoslavia	Denmark	Hungary
1964 Tokyo	Hungary	Czechoslovakia	East Germany
1968 Mexico City	Hungary	Bulgaria	Japan
1972 Munich	Poland	Hungary	USSR
1976 Montreal	East Germany	Poland	USSR
1980 Moscow	Czechoslovakia	East Germany	USSR
1984 Los Angeles	France	Brazil	Yugoslavia
1988 Seoul	USSR	Brazil	West Germany
1992 Barcelona	Spain	Poland	Ghana
1996 Atlanta	Nigeria	Argentina	Brazil
2000 Sydney	Cameroun	Spain	Chile
2004 Athens	Argentina	Paraguay	Italy
2008 Beijing