List of participating nations at the Winter Olympic Games
The first Winter Games were held in 1924, in Chamonix, France. They were originally called "International Winter Sports Week" and held in association with the 1924 Summer Olympics, but were in retrospect designated by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as the "I Olympic Winter Games".
Sixteen nations participated in these Games: fourteen from Europe and two from North America.
Four years later, 25 nations were represented at the 1928 Winter Olympics, in St. Moritz, Switzerland, including Argentina (the first nation from the Southern Hemisphere), Japan (the first Asian nation), and Mexico.
Participation in the 1932 Games, held in Lake Placid, United States, during the Great Depression, was reduced to 17 nations.
The 1936 Winter Games, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, had 28 participating nations, the largest number to that date.
These would be the last Winter Games for twelve years, as the planned 1940 Games and 1944 Games were cancelled due to World War II.
Winter Olympic Games
The Winter Olympics have been an ideological front in the Cold War since the Soviet Union first participated at the 1956 Winter Games. It did not take long for the Cold War combatants to discover what a powerful propaganda tool the Olympic Games could be. The advent of the state-sponsored "full-time amateur athlete" of the Eastern Bloc countries further eroded the ideology of the pure amateur, as it put the self-financed amateurs of the Western countries at a disadvantage. The Soviet Union entered teams of athletes who were all nominally students, soldiers, or working in a profession, but many of whom were in reality paid by the state to train on a full-time basis. Nevertheless, the IOC held to the traditional rules regarding amateurism until the '90s.