Participation in Winter Olympics: a sluggish start gymkhanas with competitions in different sports, Over the last century, the Winter Olympic and take on boxing teachers instead of tango Games have become the most important win- instructors". ter sports competition of all. Devoid of any The second source of opposition were the precedence, their components, originally Scandinavians, in particular the Swedish based on sports practices from Europe, varied General V.G. Balck. They had been organising greatly at the mercy of the upper classes of the Nordic Games since 1901, and were very developed countries. Up until 1992, the attached to their monopoly on international Winter Olympics were held in the same year winter sports competitions. as the Summer Olympics, but they have enjoyed increasing visibility ever since International Winter Sports Week Lillehammer (1994) by alternating a summer It required all the perseverance of a few men, and a winter Olympic Games every second in particular the Count of Clary, the Marquis of year. Nonetheless, the Winter Olympics have a Polignac and a certain F. Reichel, to overcome restricted representation of the world : con- the reluctance and convince the majority of trary to the Summer Olympics, where athlet- the members of the IOC of the merits of ics assures a universal level of participation, Winter Olympic Games. In reality, it was only the practice of winter sports calls for climatic a partial victory - the first edition took place in conditions and expensive infrastructures that Chamonix in 1924 under the name limit the possibilities for participation. In this "International Winter Sports Week". Although new century, it will no doubt be one of the this competition under the auspices of the IOC missions of the IOC to open the Winter was not an integral part of the Olympic Olympics up to more countries. Games, the organisers did everything in their power to have this event considered as the Difficult Beginnings first Winter Olympic Games. The success of this "International Winter Sports Week" meant The Winter Olympics occupy a very special that it was officially recognised at the 24th con- place in the Olympic movement. Their begin- gress of the IOC in Prague in 1925. nings were harder and later than the Summer Originally considered as the winter comple- Olympics, which benefited from a wide con- ment to the Summer Olympic Games, the sensus around the revolutionary Pierre de Winter Olympics were generally granted auto- Coubertin. The Winter Olympics were pure matically to the host country of the summer innovation, created without any historical Olympics (right of priority), with the exception reference, and had a long and difficult start in of Saint-Moritz in 1928, since the Netherlands life. would have had great difficulty organising such an event. It was not until the end of the Coubertin and the Scandinavians against the second World War that the Winter Olympics Winter Olympics began to gain their independence from their Neither welcomed nor well prepared, the summer counterpart, and started to become Winter Olympics were faced with opposition the event we know today. on two different fronts. Firstly, Coubertin him- self was against them for fear that the "white gold" would be exploited in a mercenary man- ner contrary to the spirit of the Olympic ideal. He wrote a few lines particularly critical of winter sports in the "Olympic Review" of March 1914 : "There is no doubt that the number of people practising winter sports has greatly increased (...). However, there is also no doubt that many winter sports resorts, where a sporting spirit reigned heretofore, have rapidly declined in this regard. The sportsmen themselves are not at fault, at least not directly, but rather the high bid- ding hoteliers and the new market niche that they The opening ceremony at the first Olympic Games are creating (...). This is why clever hoteliers would in Chamonix (FRA) in 1924 do well to attract real sportsmen who are less (Crédits photo: IOC, Olympic Museum Collcetions) demanding but safer, and replace the sentimental 1 Participation in Winter Olympics: a sluggish start Participation in the Winter Olympic countries, which were independent between Games from 1924 to 1998: A long and 1918 and 1940. The other participating coun- unfinished conquest tries (such as Japan, Australia, Argentina, Mexico, Lebanon and Turkey) were relatively The participation of the NOCs in the Winter well integrated or close enough to the western Olympics has been very progressive over the world, and had a certain level of seniority in course of the last century. The same the Olympic movement. dynamics can be found as in the Summer Olympics, but with a time lag: a competition that originally took place among a closed group of a few western nations, then a globalisation process that is still far from com- pleted for the Winter Olympics. Games between "Europeans" up until the second World War Two main criteria determined the participation in the Games before the Second World War: firstly, seniority in the Olympic movement (founded in 1894 at the Sorbonne congress), The Turkish delegation at Garmisch PartenKirschen and secondly the practice of the sport in the in 1936 participating country. (Crédits photo: IOC, Olympic Museum Collcetions) At the first Winter Olympics in Chamonix in 1924, nearly all the participating countries were founding members in the Olympic move- The 1960s : the arrival of countries less dis- ment. The European countries, the United posed to the practice of winter sports States and Canada were all present, except After the war, the majority of the participating for Germany, which was partially isolated after countries still counted among the developed its defeat in 1918. nations of the world (New Zealand, Denmark...). The arrival of the Soviet Union in 1956 brought a new dimension to the compe- titions. However, it was not until 1968 that there was a real widening in the range of par- ticipants. The wave of new participants brought smaller European states (such as Andorra, Monaco, San Marino) on the one hand, as well as developing countries emerg- ing from colonisation on the other hand (e.g. Senegal, Morocco...). The fact that some of 1924 these countries were located in intertropical between 1968 and 1988 between 1928 and 1936 between 1992 and 1998 zones made the practice of winter sports between 1948 and 1964 almost anecdotal ! China presents a particular No participation IOC / noc dpt - cerso 2002 © case, their late arrival on the winter and sum- Date of the first NOC participation at Winter mer Olympic scene resulting rather from Olympic Games political circumstances. The presence of the European countries, in particular the Scandinavian and Alpine coun- Geopolitics and wider participation tries, and to a lesser degree Eastern Europe, The last three Winter Olympics, namely was all the more justified because they had a Albertville in 1992, Lillehammer in 1994 and history of winter sports and could therefore Nagano in 1998, have been characterised by put forward competitive athletes in the com- the explosion of the former Eastern bloc coun- petition. With a few exceptions (notable tries. Many new NOCs born out of the territo- Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Portugal and rial upheaval in the former USSR, Yugoslavia Albania), nearly all the countries of Europe and Czechoslovakia are now arriving on the took part in the Winter Olympic Games before Olympic scene (return of the Baltic republics, the Second World War, including the Baltic appearance of the majority of the ex-Soviet 2 Participation in Winter Olympics: a sluggish start the presence of the expensive infrastructures necessary for winter sports. The evolution of the Olympic programme Growth… The number of events increased continuously between 1924 and 2002, mirroring the growth of the summer Games. From only 16 events in Chamonix in 1924, this number increased to 68 in Nagano in 1998, and 78 in 2002. This A NOC coming from the disintegration of the former constant progression sawonly one exception, Yougoslavia: Bosnia-Herzegovina (Nagano delegation) in Saint-Moritz in 1928, where disciplines such (Crédits photo: Allsport) as curling, military patrol or the 4 distances in republics). This explosion almost automatical- speed skating were abandoned. ly led to a marked increase in the level of par- Over the whole history of the Games, one can ticipation. Athletes who were unable to identify three clear periods where the number qualify in the USSR can now represent their of events was on the rise. Firstly, from 1932 to Republic. On the other hand, the NOCs from 1948, the number of events increased from 14 Germany were united after the fall of the to 22 ; the increase remained rather small, Berlin Wall. Finally, the globalisation of the and was mainly due to the appearance of Winter Olympics continues with the arrival of alpine skiing events in 1936. many developing countries, or small states Secondly, between 1956 and 1964, four new (such as the islands of the Pacific and events in women’s skating were introduced, Caribbean). as well as men’s biathlon, and three luge The gradual globalisation of the participation events, increasing the total number of events of NOCs in the Winter Olympics (from from 24 to 34. Chamonix to Nagano, the number of delega- Finally, the third period, between 1984 and tions increased from 16 to 72), although not 1998, saw a more rapid rise in the number of yet complete, nonetheless attenuates some- events, with an increasing of 39 to 68. There what diminishes the dominant role of Europe are several reasons behind this: new alpine and North America. However, this growth has and Nordic skiing events (particularly team only been made possible by integrating states events), the arrival of ice hockey and biathlon that were little disposed to winter sports disci- for women, the reintroduction of curling plines, either because of their poor economic (men’s and women’s), as well as the introduc- or geographic situation (i.e., in hot climate tion of new events such as short track, snow- zones), or because they were too small to pro- boarding or freestyle skiing.