Gliding was officially accepted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) at their 1938 Cairo Conference as part of the "facultative" (optional) group of sports, and was to be staged for the first time in the 1940 Summer Olympics. An Olympic glider, the DFS Olympia Meise, was chosen in 1939 but the Games were cancelled due to the outbreak of the &lt;a href="Winter%20War"&gt;Finnish/Russian winter war&lt;/a&gt;.