The Winter Olympics Are Won by a Small Circle of Countries, Over and Over

February 22, 2022, 5:00 AM EST

There’s an exclusive club of nations that keeps winning the Winter Olympics — which for medal hopefuls has proven tough-as-ice to crack compared to the summer games, despite efforts to bring more diversity into the competition. What does it take to win? We analyze historical data on medal winnings to find out.

Of the 91 delegations that participated at the 24th Winter Olympics, less than a third won medals in Beijing this year. A Bloomberg News analysis of historical results shows that the winter games have often been dominated by Europe, along with the U.S. and Canada, creating a small circle of winners to have tasted glory.

Geography Matters

With the exceptions of Australia and, sometimes, New Zealand, the Winter Olympics are heavily skewed toward delegations from the Northern Hemisphere. The summer games draw more global participation. In the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, 88 different delegations medaled — the most on record.

The International Olympic Committee and international sports federations have made efforts to draw more delegations into the winter games. A continental quota system has improved some countries’ chances. As a result, Haiti and Saudi Arabia made their Winter Olympics debuts in skiing events in Beijing.

But there’s still a long way to go. The quotas vary, and they’re controversial, seen as an inappropriate reward for athletes who aren’t qualified.

No New Members

Every Summer Olympics since 1924, new delegations medal for the first time. In Tokyo, San Marino, Turkmenistan and Burkina Faso earned their first Summer Olympic medals. But no new delegation has medaled at the Winter Olympics since the 2006 Torino games.

Unexpected Medals Happen Less Often

As the pool of winter winners stays frozen, the competitors have meanwhile expanded their medal takings in other events.

This year, more than 50 medals were awarded to delegations who were first-time winners for a particular event. New Zealand snowboarder Zoi Sadowski-Synnott won the country’s first medal in Women’s Slopestyle — also its first Winter Olympics gold. China got its first medal — a bronze — in the Men’s Skeleton event.

Event by event, new winners are generally less likely in the winter games than in the summer. Bloomberg News analyzed every medal in the history of the Olympics and calculated how many of the medals could be considered surprises, awarded to a delegation that had never won in that event before.

Note: New events were excluded from each year’s total medal count

Source: Bloomberg analysis with data from International Olympic Committee

At the Beijing Games, the women’s ice hockey medals went to Canada, Finland and U.S. — a triad that’s won 86% of all medals in the event since it was added to the Winter Olympics in 1998.

Men’s downhill alpine skiing is also dominated by three countries: Austria, France and Switzerland. They were at the top of the podium when the event made its debut in 1948, have stayed relevant and were the top three this year. Combined, they’ve brought home 44 medals, more than two-thirds of the hardware awarded in the history of the event.

Wealth and Olympic Glory

Geography and climate aren’t the only factors contributing to success at the winter games. In the most recent Olympics, countries with higher GDP per capita tended to win more medals, especially in the winter games.

Note: Per-capita GDP is measured in 2011 international dollars, and adjusted for inflation and price differences between countries.

China and Russia are the exceptions. Both have sizable populations, and have hosted recent Winter Olympics games. China in particular has invested heavily in making sports a driver of economic growth.

In the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, China placed second in both gold and total medals, and was only one gold medal behind the U.S. This year, Russian athletes continued their dominance in winter sports like figure skating — taking home 32 medals in total, second only to Norway.

* Russia competed under ROC in 2020 and 2022 due to sanctions for doping

Sources: International Olympic Committee; Olympedia.org; World Bank, IMF via Gapminder; Bloomberg

Methodology:

For participants and medals, Bloomberg acquired historical data from the International Olympic Committee and Olympedia.org, an online database maintained by a group of Olympic historians and statisticians.

In the last century, some places experienced transformation including separation and merger (e.g. Soviet Union, Yugoslavia). In this analysis, we handled them as different entities.

Due to sanctions for doping, Russia is banned from competing in the Olympics between 2017 and 2022. Its athletes competed under the acronym ROC (Russian Olympic Committee) in 2020 and 2022 Olympics and OAR in 2018. In this analysis, those results are included as RUS (Russian Federation).

Edited by: Jeremy Scott Diamond, Janet Paskin and Kristine Servando

With assistance from: Alice Truong, Alex Tribou and Adrian Leung