How the Winter Olympics became a soft-power secret weapon

The Winter Olympics are better than the Summer Games for one big reason: the sports are far more dangerous. With the exception of BMX racing, which might have been designed by orthopaedic surgeons working on commission, the greatest risks run by summer Olympians are the sort of strains and sprains that, while doubtless painful for the athlete, are merely tedious for the spectator.

Winter Olympians can crash luges and bobsleighs, wipe out off snowboards, clobber each other into hockey-rink barriers, careen off ski runs into forests and lose their balance mid-leap from the ski-jumping ramp to land with an audible fracturing of limbs. Even the relatively prim and genteel pastime of figure skating offers opportunities to descend from a height, at speed, onto a surface that’s as hard as cement but colder. Winter Olympians are – and the epithet is offered in respect verging on outright awe – total maniacs.

The Winter Olympics have generally been regarded as a junior partner of their summer counterpart. The cold-weather edition started later – the first was held in 1924, 28 years after the first modern Summer Olympics – and they involve a smaller number of competitors, as fewer countries have climates conducive to the training of athletes. Just 91 nations competed at the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing; by contrast, 204 (including the refugee team and independent contingent) attended the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.

A lack of snow at home does not have to impede competing in the colder months, however – indeed, it should be considered a challenge. Meanwhile, the soft-power benefits to a warm, dry country that decides to take a swing at the Winter Games can be huge. After all, everyone loves an underdog. The Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics will feature competitors from such unlikely places as Brazil, Eritrea, Haiti, and Madagascar, all of which might well leave with no medals but will win a raised profile.

The model for this sort of enterprise was established in 1988 when Jamaica greatly enhanced the general gaiety by sending a bobsleighing team to the Calgary Games. It finished last in the four-man competition but its story was immortalised in the 1993 John Candy comedy Cool Runnings – and nobody made a Hollywood film about the Swiss team that finished first. (Somewhat unfairly, the Jamaican team also drew the spotlight away from its Caribbean rivals from the Netherlands Antilles – whom proved to be better bobsleighers.) But this is surely the Olympic spirit at its purest: the joy of taking part, with not the faintest prayer of winning.

The importance of the Winter Olympics can be seen not just in who wants to take part but who wants to host. It has always been well understood that the Winter Games can be as much an advertisement for a city and/or country as the summer ones. Josip Broz Tito, the leader of what was still Yugoslavia, had been dead for four years when the Winter Olympics came to Sarajevo in 1984. But the bid had been made on his watch, partly with the idea of promoting Tito’s idea of non-aligned socialism to the world, as well as to encourage patriotic cohesion among his own disparate peoples. Neither was a total success.

Russia carefully managed the public relations around two Winter Olympics. In 2014, Russia waited until the Sochi Games were finished before seizing Crimea from Ukraine. In 2022, Vladimir Putin travelled to Beijing for that year’s Winter Games – and it is generally believed that it was then that he pitched his plan for the invasion of Ukraine to China’s president, Xi Jinping, who asked him to restrain the dogs of war until the Olympic flame had been doused.

The 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City gave us what was arguably the most useful and heartening morality fable in the history of sport. On the last lap of the final of the men’s 1,000-metres short-track speed skating, Australia’s Steven Bradbury was a distant last and possibly beginning to console himself by pondering the miracle that he was there at all. Bradbury had come back from hideous injuries twice in his career – an accidental slash from a rival’s blade in 1994, which had spilled four litres of his blood on the rink, and a broken neck from a crash during training in 2000, which prompted the doctors who repaired him with screws and steel plates to tell him that he would never skate again.

But, at the final corner of the race, all four of Bradbury’s rivals fell over each other, leaving the Australian athlete cruising to gold, bearing the expression of a man realising that he would never again pay for a drink back home. It was a reminder that fortune favours not merely the brave but, every so often, the diligent, pragmatic and patient.

---

Winter Olympic winners, past and future

Gold: Greatest winter Olympian
Norwegian cross-country skier Marit Bjørgen won 15 medals, eight of them gold, across five Winter Games. In all Olympic history, only American swimmer Michael Phelps and Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina have won more. Bjørgen isn’t but should be a household name.

Silver: Best mascot
For the 1984 Sarajevo Games, Slovenian artist Jože Trobec created Vucko, a cheerful wolf draped in a scarlet scarf, prone to misadventure – essentially Wile E Coyote’s Balkan cousin. His signature howl of the host city’s name was furnished by Bosnian-Serb pop singer Zdravko Colic. Besides being extremely cool, Vucko was a fine example of pan-Yugoslav co-operation.

Bronze: Unlikeliest future bidder
Saudi Arabia is due to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games, which has led to rumours of a future Winter Olympic bid – despite what might appear to be a fundamental difficulty: a lack of snow.