The molecule was conceived in March 2010 as a way to celebrate the 2012 London Olympics by Graham Richards of University of Oxford and Antony Williams.

It was first synthesized by researchers Anish Mistry and David Fox of the University of Warwick in the UK.

[1][2][3] Relative energies of olympicene and its isomers were first predicted from quantum electronic-structure computations by Andrew Valentine and David Mazziotti of the University of Chicago.

Professor Sir Martyn Poliakoff of the University of Nottingham has pointed out that the Olympic rings are interlinked, rather than tangent as in olympicene, and that a better likeness could be made using catenanes.

More detailed images were made by IBM researchers in Zurich using non-contact atomic force microscopy in 2012.