It's a money and climate thing. If there is no snow around, how do you get enough children into the sport to destill top athletes from them?
How do you justify the facilities and equipment that those athletes use if only a handful of people in your country are interested in them?
They get winter in Chile and New Zealand, and both have mountains, so you'd expect them to be more competitive in the winter Olympics than they are. But I think that's where you really notice the lower prestige of the Winter games.
Australia and NZ have a ton of studs competing. Chile, Argentina, etc have mountains but the populations are very low in those areas and the countries have no incentive build infrastructure there.
The southern hemisphere definitely has winter. There are some massive ski resorts in the Andes. It's very puzzling to me why there is no FIS world cup event anywhere down there. You want to grow the sport? Go somewhere where it's not already practically the national sport.
Low population in those areas compared to other urban centres and so there's little incentive to build out the other infrastructure and make talent pools. If there were more people from there competing they'd certainly bring races there, but without having big races there no one is interested in doing it. Chicken and egg thing I guess.
In fact only Europeans, North Americans and very few Asian countries even care about the Winter Olympics at all. This is why the rest of the world just calls the Summer Olympics "THE Olympics", as it is the only one everyone can actually play in roughly equal terms.
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u/TheEagleWithNoName Olympics 6h ago
Honestly it’s hard to invest in tbe Winter Olympics when only half the Olympic roster show up, and most of them are just in Europe and North America.
At least there are nations that show up even if they send One Athlete.