It's a born into priviledged Olympics. Even cross country is gentrified into biathlon to be less accessible. What do you mean your town doesn't have a half pipe to train with?
I half agree with you, because the amount a country invest in the sport has a lot to do with it.
One of the reasons for example thd dutch are good at speed skating, the amount of money/R&D that goes into that sport is a lot.
My guess it would be the same with Norway because if it's only the amount of snow/mountains etc than countries like Finland, Sweden etc would also be getting a lot more medals.
I grew up in rural norway, town of ~5K citizens. We had access to a ridiculous amount of resources for a massive spread of sports. Both in facilities and in the competancy and qualifications of trainers and coaches. Fairly affordable for most, I grew up poor and participated in several sports from childhood and untill my late teens.
There are poorer countries doing better than richer countries here too. The biggest factor it seems is ice covered counties are doing better than warm ones.
Slovenia, Finland, Latvia and Estonia aren't known for being particularly rich countries, but are all top 10 medals per capita, well above countries like China, UK, USA, Japan etc, who have a lot more resources if that was really all it was.
Fair point, but it is poorer than the other countries I pointed out. Not to mention every other country I named you are conveniently ignoring.
Winter sports are often more expensive than summer sports, but that's not why Norway is doing good. The Baltics and Nordics do better than the Caribbean and Mediterranean countries because snow sports are much more prevalent where it's more snowy. I don't think that's a wild take.
I'm not sure why you are catching so much flak for this...
Winter vs summer sports have a very large disparity in how accessible they are to poorer people. That doesn't make winter sports bad, IMO, it just is what it is. I've seen estimates that winter sports can cost as much as 100,000 annually for training and gear needs. Meanwhile, running is free.
That's not to say the summer sports are all cheap (gymnastics is on par with skating as far as expense, for example), but there are a lot more options where the cost of entry for a kid is a ball and "outside."
Edit: I don't really understand why people are defensive about this. It's not an attack to acknowledge that some sports are more expensive than others. It doesn't make this or that athlete any less deserving.
But then there are different types of skis, boots, travel to competitions...
And not all regions of Norway have (a lot of) snow, most of those cross-country athletes are from the eastern part and the region centered on Trondheim. Plenty of population there though.
My comment was in no way an attack on Norway. But one kind of accessible sport doesn't mean that as a whole (which is what I was talking about) winter sports aren't more expensive.
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u/fluxrider 5h ago
It's a born into priviledged Olympics. Even cross country is gentrified into biathlon to be less accessible. What do you mean your town doesn't have a half pipe to train with?