One aspect that sets the Olympics apart from other international athletics competitions is how many more countries get to compete on the world’s biggest stage. For example, while the FIFA World Cup has room for 48 teams to compete, the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics hosted athletes from 92 different countries. Every team in the World Cup brings the same number of players, while the number of Olympians from each competing nation can vary heavily. While Team USA featured 232 competitors, 17 countries were represented by just one athlete. In most cases, it’s miraculous how these people came to be 2026 Olympians.

One of the best examples that show the lengths a nation has to go to to have just one representative at the Olympics is Guinea-Bissau, a country of two million people in West Africa. The climate in Guinea-Bissau makes essentially all winter sports impossible; the lowest temperature ever recorded anywhere in the country is 54 degrees Fahrenheit. Just as shocking is their representative in Milan: Winston Tang, a 19-year-old Taiwanese-American from Oregon. There are conditions under which athletes can compete for countries they were not born or raised in. In Tang’s case, his former Olympic-skier father was looking for investment opportunities in Guinea-Bissau’s cashew industry. The Winter Olympics came up during conversations with government officials, spiraling into the creation of the Winter Sports Federation of Guinea-Bissau in 2024. Tang was granted citizenship to the nation through his father’s connection with the government and was cleared to compete. Tang made the nation’s debut in the Winter Olympics when he participated in the alpine skiing slalom event, though he did not finish.

Another alpine skier born in North America but who chose to represent a country in Africa is Shannon Ogbnai Abeda. Although born and raised in Fort McMurray, Canada, he represented the country of Eritrea. In Abeda’s case, he qualified to compete for Eritrea through his parents, who were born there and fled to Canada during the Eritrean War of Independence in the 1980’s. He grew up skiing in the Canadian Rockies and competed nationally in high school, but decided to represent Eritrea rather than Canada to try and qualify for the 2012 Youth Olympics and earned his Eritrean passport in the process. He’s competed for Eritrea ever since, including a previous appearance in the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. Abeda returned from retirement to compete in Milan this year, though he was eliminated during qualifiers for alpine skiing slalom.

Of the 17 countries with one Olympian, only one did not participate in a skiing event.  That one non-skier was Kellie Delka, a skeleton racer representing Puerto Rico. Another quirk of the Olympic qualifying process is that some non-sovereign areas and territories compete under their own flags, such as Australia’s Cook Islands or the British Virgin Islands. Puerto Rico is another example, and was one of two non-sovereign regions that sent athletes to participate in Milan alongside Hong Kong. Delka was the first skeleton racer to ever compete for Puerto Rico and placed 24th in the women’s competition this year.

Some countries with one Olympian such as Colombia, Malaysia, Uruguay and Venezuela all have climates incompatible with maintaining winter athletics, so their 2026 Olympians all honed their craft in another part of the world. Malaysia’s Aruwin Salehhuddin was born and raised just outside of Seattle, Venezuela’s Frederik Fodstad was adopted at birth by Norwegian parents, Uruguay’s Nicolas Pirozzi is Chilean by birth and Benin’s Nathan Tchibozo has been practicing in France since the age of three.

Other nations such as Bolivia, Ecuador and Kenya don’t have the infrastructure to support winter sports despite having the necessary temperatures and geography. Bolivia’s elevation makes it only suitable for ski mountaineering, an event that debuted at the Olympics this year. Bolivia’s lone representative, Timo Gronlund, previously cross-country skied for Finland, his birth nation, before switching to Bolivia, his wife's nationality. Ecuador’s Andes mountains are capable of being cross-country skied, but the terrain makes trips more of a technical challenge than a race. Ecuador’s lone athlete this year, 46-year-old Klaus Jungbluth, began his skiing career as a college student in Australia and is the only Winter Olympian to ever represent Ecuador. In Kenya, while skiing is possible, it’s limited to Mount Kenya and is incredibly dangerous. Kenya’s 2026 Olympian, Issah Laborde, instead trained L’Alpe Huez in France, a resort where her father worked as a ski patroller. 

There are also four nations that are too small to have many places in the nation to train, if any at all. Among Malta, San Marino, Monaco and Singapore, the only one with a ski slope is San Marino. Two nations had athletes making their Olympic debuts, with 17-year-old Rafael Mini alpine skiing for San Marino and 20-year-old Jenny Axisa Eriksen participating in cross-country for Malta. Singapore’s Faiz Basha and Monaco’s Arnaud Alessandria each competed in alpine skiing, placing 35th and 30th respectively in the men’s downhill.

While a lot of the countries with only one 2026 Olympian are small or don’t receive much cold weather, some break that trend. The two biggest outliers in this regard are Nigeria and Pakistan, each of which has over 200 million people. Even though the countries couldn’t be more different topographically, they each have the same problem that prevents them from being athletic powerhouses: a lack of infrastructure. Nigeria has the same problem as Guinea-Bissau, being in a part of the world that hardly ever receives weather cold enough to sustain any kind of winter athletics within its borders. Pakistan is the complete opposite; the mountains they have in the north, the Himalayas, are too remote and rugged to ski on safely. Nigeria’s one 2026 Olympian, cross-country skier Samuel Ikpefan, was born and raised in the French Alps, a much more suitable environment to ski in than Nigeria. He placed 65th out of a field of 95 racers in the Men’s cross-country skiing sprint event. Pakistan’s representative, Muhammad Karim, was born in northern Pakistan and has been competing in Olympic skiing events since participating in the 2014 Sochi games as a 19-year-old. Today, Karim has the most appearances in the Olympics for any Pakistani athlete. 

Although none of these lone athletes won medals in their events in Milan this year, it’s a particularly impressive feat for any of them to be competing at all. Nearly all of these athletes compete for nations that have very little or no capacity for winter sports infrastructure. Even though many of these athletes needed to have special circumstances to get around the geographical barriers they faced, being able to compete at the highest level in spite of those issues is part of what makes the Winter Olympics such a compelling watch every four years.