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The Winter Olympics is being absolutely dominated by nations with... checks notes ... cold winters and mountains.
I'm not even reading the article, this is such a dumb premise that comes up every time. If Europe was forced to compete as a single nation, we'd have a lot fewer participants. And then there's just the fact that counting medals is kinda dumb anyway, since some sports have may more medals than others - a country that specialises in ice skating will often be good at many types of it, be it 500m, 1000m, etc.
That's only partially true.
Italy is right now third in the rank (second in medal numbers) and the mountains and cold winters are only partially true.
Spain shares the same climate, with arguably more mountains and land where the winters are really cold and they are lagging a lot in the rank, they sent something like 20 people or so to compete where Italy sent many more {something like 120 iirc).
It's not just having mountains and cold winters.
Italy includes most of the southern alps and specifically Alto Adige with the Dolomites, which is one of the most popular regions for alpine sports, be it winter or summer. Most of the Italian athletes are from that region of Italy, not from Puglia or Sicily.
Spain has mostly the Pyrenees, which are lower, have less snow on average, no glaciers and worse infrastructure. Sierra Nevada is tiny in comparison to what the Italian alps ca offer, albeit it’s an option for glacial skiing.
Your example actually shows that the other poster was right.
Spain has also Sierra Nevada, which is higher and also offers snow.
I agree on the infrastructure, but that makes my statement true because it's then a question of investing.
Still, many of the sports don't even require a mountain or a cold winter (see ice hockey, all kinds of skating, curling...) and yet, Spain has way less people there than Italy.
We’re splitting hairs here… infrastructure will obviously only be where good winter conditions are. If no one considers your conditions good for winter sports they won’t come/invest so there will be less infrastructure.
Also, if you’ve never seen real ice outside, you’re less likely to get really into hockey or skating or bobsledding.
You are correct that there are also factors like culture, heritage in winter sports, infrastructure, financial backing, etc. But those are all dependent on having good mountains and winters in the first place. Northern Italy has them, Spain not so much.
Edit: To make a better case for your argument you could have picked a Caucasus Nation. Azerbaijan have great mountains with lots of snow, but are way less successful because of lack in funding, infrastructure and a culture around winter sports.
If you take a look at many of the sports in the winter olympics, they require quite expensive infrastructure that can only be used by a small elite of athletes. Ski Jump and bob are the best examples - your government has to be willing to invest multiple millions in a ski jump ramp that can only be used by a selected few athletes. And your bob / skeleton track is also expensive as fuck and cannot be used by the general public.
Other disciplines are also about the willingness of your state to pour money into winning gold: Take a look at ice dancing. There the Chinese and Russians have those inhuman selection processes where athletes are selected as children and are trained in inhuman conditions for years. If you want gold as a country, you have to invest money here to finance the athletes' livelihoods and provide them with the necessary ice rink, etc., so that they can train full-time. But of course, there are good reasons for a country not to do that. There are certainly better ways to spend taxpayers' money than financing individual athletes who may then win a medal every four years.
Fair enough, those are good points. In principle I agree with both of you. I just think that all of these factors are secondary to the right geographical and meteorological conditions. There are plenty of countries that have the capacity to invest, but don’t care about medals at the Winter Olympics because they don’t have a culture in winter sports because they don’t have proper winters.
I also think the example of Italy vs Spain was not ideally chosen to make the argument.
Necessary but not sufficient conditions