When Chinese President Xi Jinping appeared at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia—the first time a Chinese head of state had attended a major sporting event abroad—he announced his intention to get 300 million Chinese citizens to participate in winter sports.
The next year, after China had won the bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, the government launched a nationwide push to hit that target. China added winter sports into school curriculums, invested billions of dollars in sporting infrastructure, and began allowing elite, foreign-born athletes to compete under its flag.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping appeared at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia—the first time a Chinese head of state had attended a major sporting event abroad—he announced his intention to get 300 million Chinese citizens to participate in winter sports.
The next year, after China had won the bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, the government launched a nationwide push to hit that target. China added winter sports into school curriculums, invested billions of dollars in sporting infrastructure, and began allowing elite, foreign-born athletes to compete under its flag.
“The purpose of high-level sports in China is diplomacy,” said Susan Brownell, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who researches Chinese sports. In that respect, the 2022 Beijing Olympics were less than successful. Though U.S. athletes participated, the White House announced a diplomatic boycott of the Games, citing China’s “ongoing genocide” in Xinjiang, and nine other countries joined in.
However, China’s athletic successes in Beijing enabled its ascent into the company of traditional Winter Olympic powerhouses—northern, rich, and largely white countries where skiing, skating, and sledding are habitual. With the home field advantage, China placed fourth in total medals, after Norway, Germany, and the United States.
Today, China has the most ski resorts in the world, generates trillions of dollars in winter tourism revenue, and counts athletes such as U.S.-born freestyle skier Eileen Gu among its Olympic medalists. As the country aims to build on its success in Beijing in 2022, we took a look at how China has measured up in past Winter Olympics, how it stacks up to the competition at this month’s Milan Cortina Games, and whether its push for winter sports dominance will pay off.
The first three times that China participated in the Winter Olympics, it won no medals—but its ambitions for success were already well known. In 1984, when the Summer and Winter Games were held in Los Angeles and Sarajevo, respectively, the New York Times reported that China had set itself a challenge to “break out of Asia and advance on the world.”
China won its first Winter Olympic medals—three silver, all for speed skating—in 1992 in Albertville, France. Speed skater Yang Yang won China’s first two gold medals a decade later, in Salt Lake City.
“China really has tended to watch the gold medal count” as opposed to total medal numbers, which the United States favors when measuring Olympic success, Brownell said.
Barring record-setting victories at Milan Cortina, China had its best showing at the 2022 Beijing Games. China’s 182 athletes—up from just 79 in 2018—competed in 95 percent of the Games’ events and won 15 medals, including a national record of nine gold. (Its next-highest placing, in Vancouver in 2010, was eighth.)
“China doesn’t really care that much if it can beat Norway in the total medal count, especially in the Winter Games,” Brownell said. Instead, its push for Winter Olympics dominance has largely been guided by its desire to compete with Japan and South Korea—an East Asian rivalry that accelerated after South Korea won the bid, in 2011, to host the 2018 Winter Olympics. The Beijing Games were the third consecutive Olympics held in East Asia, following Pyeongchang in 2018 and Tokyo in 2021.
China’s delegation size has decreased by 56 athletes this year, mirroring similar falloffs for South Korea and Japan after they hosted the Games. Host countries often get automatic berths in events, such as the Chinese men’s hockey team, which made its only Olympic appearance in 2022 with 25 athletes.
Though China now consistently sends more athletes to the Winter Olympics than Norway, the all-time leader in medals, it still has yet to match the delegation sizes of the United States and Canada, which have routinely sent more than 200 athletes to Winter Games since the 2000s.
Alongside steady delegation growth, China has also expanded participation across disciplines. China only participated in the figure skating, speed skating, and skiing events until 1998, when it mustered a women’s hockey team for the Games in Nagano, Japan.
In 2018, China added bobsleigh and skeleton to its repertoire. It even claimed a bronze medal in men’s skeleton in 2022—the same year the country competed in luge and Nordic combined events for the first time.
This year in Milan Cortina, China is competing in a national record 116 events, including ski mountaineering for the first time. Beijing has so far won medals in freestyle skiing, speed skating, and snowboarding—and it appears poised to keep climbing the ranks.
