How to Win at the Olympics Forever
Photo: Simon Billy, Wikimedia Commons (accessed March 24, 2026).
The most dominant dynasty in the history of the Winter Olympics isn’t a hockey team, a ski nation, or a Nordic powerhouse. It’s Germany, in luge. German athletes have won more total Olympic luge medals than every other country combined. They have won every team relay since the event was invented. From 1994 to 2022, they won nearly three-quarters of all available gold medals. They are, in the world of sliding sports, essentially unkillable.
Every four years, the Winter Olympics appears to offer the world’s athletes a level playing field. The same events, the same rules, the same ice. In theory, the best athlete or team on any given day should win. But in certain sports, the outcome isn’t really determined at the Games. It’s determined decades beforehand, by decisions about infrastructure, funding, culture, and access that compound quietly over time until one country’s advantage becomes so structural that competing with it requires more than just talent.
How does that happen? And more interestingly, how do other countries manage to do the same thing, in entirely different ways?
Germany, Luge and the Power of Geopolitics
Since the debut of luge at the 1964 Winter Olympics Games in Innsbruck through Cortina 2026, German athletes have won 92 total medals in luge, 31 of them gold. From 1994 to 2022, Germany won 72% of all gold medals. Germany has won 25 of 57 Olympic gold medals. Second place? East Germany, with 13 gold medals, despite only competing at 6 Winter Olympic Games as a country. No country has dominated a single event quite like Germany has dominated luge over the last 40 years.
So how does a country get this good at sliding down an ice tunnel on a tiny sled? The answer, like most answers involving German excellence, begins with history.
In the 1960s, East Germany figured something out. Olympic medals, it turned out, were one of the most efficient propaganda tools on the planet. They were relatively cheap to generate, they were internationally recognized, and they generated the kind of favorable coverage that dollars or Ostmarks couldn’t easily buy.
The key was picking the right sports. You needed an opportunity with a technically-demanding, resource-intensive discipline where a small country willing to commit to serious infrastructure could punch massively above its weight. For this use-case, luge was almost perfect. The sleds required engineering. The tracks required construction. The training required year-round access. And most of all, the sport would just be making its Olympic debut in 1964, meaning a low profile and even lower competition levels. With the growing obsession Cold War-era governments had with winning Olympics medals as a proxy for national superiority, East Germany was ready to invest heavily, hoping world domination would follow.
And boy, did it ever. The Germans immediately put the luge game in a chokehold at the 1964 Innsbruck Games. Competing as “The United Team of Germany”, German athletes captured 5 of a possible 9 medals, including a clean sweep of the men’s singles podium and gold and bronze in the women’s singles.
It’s impossible to overstate the momentum that those first gold medals created. Gold medals breed attention, publicity, and importantly; funding. Funding then leads to means for increasing performance, whether that be through infrastructure improvements, extensive youth academies, or both in the case of East Germany.
After the initial Olympic success, state sports academies identified promising athletes young—specifically, those with body measurements and weight distributions ideally proportioned for the sled. Coaching programs were systematized. Sport science institutes developed intensive training protocols. And crucially, they built the tracks.
In the 1980s East Germany constructed and upgraded permanent artificial refrigerated sliding tracks—at Oberhof, at Altenberg—designed specifically for year-round training at Olympic standards. Altenberg, in particular, is widely understood to have been built in the early 1980s precisely to accelerate East Germany’s medal production in sliding sports. It worked. By the time the Cold War ended, East Germany’s luge program had become the most dominant apparatus in the history of the sport. And those facilities? Germany currently lays claim to four high-performance luge facilities, the highest concentration of artificial tracks in the world, and almost 25% of all international-standard artificial tracks across the globe.
It’s worth mentioning that, during that time, East Germany had a state-sponsored doping operation running in the background. It’s impossible to fully understand how much of the dominance came from engineering and coaching, and how much came from the medicine cabinet. But what’s clear is that the infrastructure and institutional knowledge built during that era proved enduring in ways the doping program obviously could not be.
The country’s grip on luge became even tighter after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the two Germanys merged into one. West Germany had money. East Germany had expertise, facilities, and decades of accumulated knowledge. The merger created a competitive arrangement almost too good to be natural: Cold War infrastructure funded at a level of a unified Western European economy.
The result has been a country that wins at luge because it built, over the course of sixty years, a self-reinforcing system: political will, infrastructure, science, tradition, and competition, with each element strengthening the others. Other countries can copy pieces of it, but none can truly manage to replicate the same set of circumstances to cultivate success.
But state-funded programs aren’t the only way to become dominant at an Olympic sport. For some countries, it’s simply ingrained in the culture.
Canada, Cold-weather Culture & Curling
Canada’s dominance in curling didn’t begin as a deliberate national project; it began as a social pastime.
Where Scottish immigrants settled across Canada in the early 1800s, curling quickly followed. The first organized club appeared in Montreal in 1807, and from there the sport slid westward with organic, unstoppable momentum propelled by the need for entertainment in Canada’s long, cold winters. Also fueling the growth of the sport was ease; Curling needed no mountains, no oceans, no particular conditions or terrain other than cold and flat, which Canada has in abundance. A small rural community in Canada could build a rink on essentially nothing, and thousands of them did, especially in the west. By 1910, Winnipeg had become the center of the curling universe, with more clubs than Montreal and Toronto combined.
But what started as social activity for hundreds of small prairie villages produced an unintended side effect: an enormous pipeline of competitive experience that no other country could replicate.
By 1927, Canada had enough clubs to justify a national championship—The Brier, which has run almost every year since. The competition regularly attracts broadcast audiences of over one million, but more importantly, it forces all Canadian curlers to prove themselves against the best competition in the world (each other), year after year, before they even get to an international stage.
First, a Canadian curler with Olympic aspirations must compete in their province, climbing through local and regional playdowns. Then they compete at The Brier, where teams from all 13 provinces and territories fight for a national title. Then—if they’re among the absolute elite—they compete at the Olympic Trials where the national champion, top-ranked teams, and a handful of wildcards all compete in a single-elimination gauntlet for an Olympic berth.
The result of such a high-stakes competitive circuit? A wide depth of talent that no other country can compete with.
Canada has won at least one curling medal in every Olympics since Nagano 1998. From 1994-2022, Canadian teams won 38% of all gold medals in the sport. At the 2014 Sochi games, the country won a clean sweep of every team curling event. Their medal count grew after this year’s Milan-Cortina games, where they added another gold and bronze medal to their laundry list of accolades—and even double-touched off an Olympic controversy to boot. They’ve been almost as dominant as Germany has been in luge, but they’ve done it in an entirely different way.
Germany built a system and poured state resources into building infrastructure from the top down. The result was a dynasty powered by institutional design. Canada didn’t build anything exactly, the sport just…grew. No central authority or government decided that curling would be Canada’s sport. Thousands of small towns just decided to curl, and kept doing it for 200 years.
South Korea’s Short-track Speedskating Stardom
South Korea has won 26 gold medals and 53 total medals in short-track speed skating since the sport became an official Olympic event in 1992 — more than any other country by a significant margin. China, second on the all-time gold list, has 12. Canada, third, has 10. South Korea is also the only country to have won at least one gold medal at every single Olympics the sport has been contested. For nearly the entirety of the sport’s Olympic existence, South Korea has been not just the best team, but the team by which all other teams measure themselves.
While Germany’s success was largely due to funding and infrastructure, and Canada’s curling dominance is owed to culture and social constructs, South Korea’s grip on short-track speed skating is a combination of both.
South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s was urbanizing at one of the fastest rates in modern history—an astonishing economic transformation that turned a country devastated by the Korean War into an industrial powerhouse within a single generation. Cities were expanding rapidly, infrastructure was being built at speed, and indoor recreational facilities were part of that wave. A sport that could be practiced on a standard indoor rink, in the middle of a dense city, with relatively modest equipment costs, was exactly the kind of sport that could spread quickly in that environment; and was exactly the kind of sport that short-track speed skating was.
Short-track was also new. The sport was only recognized as a formal discipline by the International Skating Union in 1967, and its first World Championships weren’t held until 1978. There was no entrenched hierarchy of dominant nations, no century of institutional knowledge to overcome. The slate was essentially blank. For a country with the ambition to compete on the world stage—and South Korea, in the 1980s, had that ambition in abundance—a young, technically demanding sport with an accessible infrastructure footprint was close to ideal.
Much like Germany, South Korea’s sports apparatus in the 1980s operated under explicit government direction, with Olympic medals treated as instruments of national prestige. The 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics had been a coming-out party for the country, and the government’s sports planning arm was already attuned to finding events where concentrated investment could produce outsize returns.
Short-track was on the Olympic program as a demonstration sport at the 1988 Calgary Winter Games, signaling that the sport was heading toward full medal status, and it was heading there as a blank canvas that no country had yet claimed. When South Korea topped the unofficial medal table at the 1988 Calgary demonstration, winning five gold medals, the government moved. Funding increased. National coaching programs expanded.
Four years later, at the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics, short-track became an official medal sport for the first time. South Korea won two golds in the first two events ever contested. Kim Ki-hoon won the inaugural men’s 1000 meters, setting the tone for everything that followed. South Korea had spent half a decade preparing for a race the rest of the world didn’t realize was already underway.
What followed closely mirrored the pipeline Germany built for luge; early talent identification, infrastructure investment, and systems built for sustained success. But short-track had one other important trait: it was a cultural phenomenon.
South Korea isn’t just producing fast skaters, it’s creating celebrities. During the Olympics and World Championships, South Korean short-track skaters occupy a cultural space roughly equivalent to what football players or pop stars hold in other countries. Their races are appointment viewing. Their disqualifications spark national crises. When the American Apolo Anton Ohno won a controversial gold at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games after South Korea’s Kim Dong-sung was disqualified for blocking, the reaction in South Korea was so fervent that the USOC servers crashed from complaint emails, a manufacturer produced toilet paper with Ohno’s face, and the US team eventually withdrew from the following year’s World Cup event in South Korea out of concern for their safety.
That kind of self-reinforcing cultural fervor ensures the country will always be near the top of the podium, but also makes certain that the pressure Korean short-trackers face is immense. The system is notoriously intense, with multiple coaching scandals, including physical assault of athletes, surfacing repeatedly. Political infighting also makes the selection process brutal. Ahn Hyun-soo, arguably the greatest short-track skater of all-time, eventually defected to compete for Russia, driven by factionalism within the Korean skating system so deep that he could no longer receive fair selection despite being one of the best in the world (he went on to win another three Olympic golds competing for Russia).
The brutality that can chew up and spit out athletes is also one of the contributing factors to what has made the country such an Olympic powerhouse in short-track. That extraordinary pressure continues to produce extraordinary results; South Korea added 7 more medals, including 2 golds, to their tally at the Milan-Cortina 2026 games.
Who’s Next?
Countries like Germany, Canada and South Korea have proven there are multiple ways to become a dominant force at the Olympics. With a slate of new events to be debuted at the French Alps 2030 Games, who are the countries that are ready to grab Olympic glory and build around it for the next 30 years?
There are five new sports expected to be introduced in the French Alps 2030 games; Speed skiing, telemark, cross-country sprint, cyclocross, and ice cross offer five potential opportunities for countries to become the new Germany, Canada or South Korea. Let’s look at three.
Telemark
A wild, free-heeled skiing discipline that combines elements of both alpine and Nordic skiing, telemark looks very different from the downhill forms most casual viewers are accustomed to. While it might look modern and gear-heavy, it’s actually one of the oldest forms of downhill turn-based skiing. So who’s ready to dominate for the next several decades and beyond?
Well for one, telemark was invented in Norway. The country is known for their prowess in cross-country events, which have some crossover with telemark. But the country we think will plant its flag on the event will be the host country, France. France has the landscape and terrain needed to succeed in the event in abundance; both the French Alps, where the 2030 Games will happen, and the Pyrenees provide ample opportunities to practice the event. But moreso, it seems like the French are already investing in the event in anticipation of the sport being added to the Olympic schedule; currently, 3 of the top 5 spots in the men’s Telemark World Cup standings are occupied by French skiers, including the top spot.
Cyclocross
Cyclocross, an autumn/winter cycling discipline that combines elements of road cycling and mountain biking, has a “better than 50%” chance to make its debut at the 2030 French Alps games, pending an IOC decision expected in June. Once considered a long shot for inclusion in the Winter Games, part of the unique charm of cyclocross is that it happens on highly challenging terrain, with obstacles and conditions that frequently require competitors to pick up their bikes and carry them on the run. To wit: the December 2021 Cyclocross world cup event at Val di Sole in Italy on a fully snow-covered course, won by Belgium’s Wout Van Aert, that year’s defending world champ in the men’s elite division and still one of the sport’s leading lights.
On the upcoming 2026-27 UCI Cyclocross Competitions schedule, no country has more races scheduled, and on more unique tracks, than Belgium. There are a whopping 37 races scheduled on Belgian soil—22% of all listed UCI races—including the UCI Cyclocross World Championships, which will be hosted at Ostende. There doesn’t appear to be a country that has the infrastructure to dominate quite like Belgium—which may not come as a surprise for a country that some say is the heart of cycling culture. Belgium are set up to go on a Germany-like run if they capture early gold and continue to invest in the program.
The next-most-likely cyclocross dynasty: the Dutch women’s program, led by four-time World Cup winner Lucinda Brand.
Speed Skiing
Thirty-eight years after its controversial debut as a demonstration at the 1992 Albertville Games, the fastest non-motorized sport on the planet may be re-joining the Games. Speed skiing, where skiers reach speeds of over 150mph, was a one-and-done 1992 demonstration after the competition was marred by the death of a Swiss skier.
In that Olympic demonstration, which also took place in France, the French won both the gold and silver in the men’s event and a bronze in the women’s. Following the Albertville tragedy, the Olympics dropped speed skiing, but FIS, the world’s ranking snow-sport body and keeper of the World Cup, did not. France has won 15 FIS World Championship golds across both men’s and women’s events, the most of any country. They’ve won a total 36 speed skiing medals—Sweden is second with 26, followed by Italy with 22. At the time of this writing, French skiers occupy first and second place in the men’s Speed Skiing World Cup, and third place in the women’s event. The French will almost certainly want to make a statement on their home soil, although the Italians may give them a run for their money.