How to Get Money for Cold Sports in Warm Places

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When Zoi Sadowski-Synnott started her final run in the women’s slopestyle, the snowboarder needed to put down her best performance of the day to force her way back on to the podium.

She delivered, winning her second silver medal of the 2026 Winter Olympics—and becoming the most decorated women’s Olympic snowboarder, with her fifth career medal.

When Zoi Sadowski-Synnott started her final run in the women’s slopestyle, the snowboarder needed to put down her best performance of the day to force her way back on to the podium.

She delivered, winning her second silver medal of the 2026 Winter Olympics—and becoming the most decorated women’s Olympic snowboarder, with her fifth career medal.

Sadowski-Synnott is one of a new group of winter athletes emerging from the Southern Hemisphere. With three medals, New Zealand repeated its best-ever Winter Olympic performance in Milan Cortina. Neighboring Australia’s six medals is the most ever won by the country at a single Winter Games. And Brazil became the first South American country to win a Winter Olympics medal when Lucas Pinheiro Braathen won gold in the giant slalom. Despite the odds, it was a big Games for the Southern Hemisphere.

New Zealand started competing at the Winter Olympics in 1952, but it’s an expensive business for southern countries. Domestically, the country has access to skiing on its South Island, where the Cardrona Alpine Resort near Wanaka houses a high performance center for winter athletes. Yet the country’s geographic isolation means athletes have to travel thousands of miles to competition locations in the Northern Hemisphere.

Like many countries, sports in New Zealand rely on government funding to grow and develop, and, because of its size, Olympic medals mean the difference between sport federations fighting for survival and the opportunity to create a long-term growth plan.

“Back in 2012, we were funded on an annual basis, and we had to, every year, effectively prove ourselves,” Nic Cavanagh, the chief executive of New Zealand snow sports, told Foreign Policy. “We managed to get two bronze medals in Pyeongchang, and that made us step up a level with our funding. And then post Beijing, we were put on a four-year cycle, and it’s sustainable. I hate to say it, but it does allow you to be more strategic and have a longer-term view with your athletes.”

A guaranteed four years of funding can make a huge difference for a country looking to gain momentum in building winter sports. Australia, which faces the same logistical hurdles as New Zealand, sent over 50 athletes to Milan Cortina, its largest-ever Winter Olympics delegation.

After success in Beijing in 2022, Australia invested nearly $27 million (in Australian dollars) for its Olympic Winter Institute, and the Australian Institute of Sport has a training center in Italy for athletes to have access to European training sites and a “home away from home.”

Higher funding is critical. For many Southern Hemisphere winter athletes, getting to World Cup events means prolonged periods of traveling, which is both costly and mentally draining. Countries like New Zealand demand high standards in global competition to get funding, but athletes often have to cover their own travel costs to compete—and those add up fast. Some of the country’s younger freestyle skiing stars rely on money from the International Olympic Committee’s Olympic Solidarity scholarships to help cover costs.

“It’s been so important,” Luke Harrold, who finished 15th in the men’s halfpipe and was a Youth Olympic Games medal winner in 2024, said of his scholarship. “It’s not easy competing in a sport like this; there are a lot of logistics and it’s not cheap. So, to have that funding is really amazing.”

Another factor working against athletes is insurance, especially for sports such as snowboarding and freestyle skiing that are unusually risky. Cavanagh said that Kiwi athletes prefer to base training in the United States over Europe, but U.S. resorts require foreign athletes to purchase insurance when practicing, rather than in New Zealand where the government pays to insure skiing and snowboarding tourists through its Accident Compensation Corporation policy.

Europe-based athletes can travel back to their home countries between events, sometimes even by car the same day. That’s not possible for travelers from the far south. Distance makes it very hard to return home in between key events, meaning they are abroad the entire winter sports season, often from October to April.

Skier “Alice Robinson leaves New Zealand every year, and gets back in April, and she’s living out of a suitcase … that whole entire time,” Cavanagh said. “To say, ‘I’m committing to a life on the road for six months of the year because I want to be the best’ takes an incredible amount of commitment.”

While Australia and New Zealand are building off their success at Milan Cortina to catapult winter sports to a new level in their countries, other places are finding ways to use the Games to build up their own infrastructure.

Lucas Pinheiro Braathen is a Norwegian Brazilian skier who specializes in the giant slalom and slalom alpine skiing events. He’s spent most of his life in Norway, and originally represented that country, a Winter Olympics powerhouse, in skiing, before switching his competition nationality to Brazil in 2024.

With his gold medal win, Team Brazil chef de mission Emilio Strapasson told Foreign Policy that Braathen could already be inspiring other athletes from the Brazilian diaspora to compete for Brazil in the future.

“We are certain that the Brazilian community, seeing this, will be even more motivated to understand that, yes, we are capable of anything,” Strapasson said. “We are capable of winning in any modality, in any environment.”

Showcasing that Brazil, the ultimate summer country, can walk away with a Winter Olympics medal is already going a long way to convince the government to increase funding for the country’s two snow and ice sports confederations.

Brazil’s tropical climate means that athletes can only practice alpine sports with simulators and need to go abroad to train. With a very weak Brazilian real, even going to other South American countries like Argentina and Chile can be cost prohibitive. As a result, the country’s Olympic Committee is leveraging the diaspora for these sports. But athletes in other sports—like short track speed skating, figure skating, and ice hockey—have the potential to train on Brazilian soil. To do that, Strapasson said, there needs to be a “very high initial investment” in building infrastructure in the country, which history shows a win like Braathen’s can catalyze.

Brazil is not the only country adopting this strategy. Most of South Africa’s five athletes at Milan Cortina 2026 were born abroad and hold South African passports.

Leon Fleiser, who sits on the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee, said that the performances of those diaspora athletes will hopefully encourage more of the South African community abroad to represent the country in future Games or pick up sports in an effort to do so.

Since these athletes came from mostly alpine and cross-country skiing events, the goal will be to engage ice sports confederations in South Africa and work toward figuring out paths to qualify more athletes for future Games, and leveraging the Olympic Solidarity scholarship to bring in new avenues of funding. South Africa has some alpine skiing venues domestically, plus access to the enclave country of Lesotho, which opens up more avenues for development.

Another plan is to learn from countries like Australia that successfully found summer sport athletes with translatable skills to winter sports, Fleiser said. Sliding sports (like luge and skeleton) have historically drawn from athletics and freestyle skiing has a lot of cross pollination with gymnastics and diving. That way, the pool of potential winter sport athletes grows considerably, given South Africa’s strong high performance sport pedigree. (Two Australian athletes, Paul Narracott and Jana Pittman, have even competed in both the Summer and Winter Olympics.)

International federations need to play their part, too, Fleiser said. “They should be sitting together with the IOC and going, ‘How do we assist in getting non-winter countries to have a participant at the games? Let’s aim to grow every single Winter Olympics by five more countries.’”

With these results from Milan Cortina, the South Africa sport federation will now begin the process of growing its team size for the 2030 Winter Olympics and, more importantly, working to get its young athletes closer towards the top half of Olympic performances. A medal target is unlikely in the near future, but could be after a few Olympic cycles.

That kind of long-term thinking has driven New Zealand to invest in dry slope facilities to practice freestyle skiing and snowboarding disciplines year-round. Cavanagh pointed to the success of the Japanese contingent of freestyle skiers and snowboarders, who’ve trained this way for a decade; Japan won 11 medals in those sports at Milan Cortina. With the ever-looming threat of climate change, these kinds of facilities may become even more important if fewer venues are able to host winter sport competitions.

All it took to get New Zealand’s facility off the ground was a few success stories at the Games.

“We did get a lot of corporate and a lot of government support” thanks to “the success of the Olympic level, of Zoi Sadowski-Synnott and Nico Porteous,” he said. “There’s no doubt; without them we would have struggled to raise the capital to build that facility.”

This post appeared in the FP Weekend newsletter, a weekly showcase of book reviews, deep dives, and features. Sign up here.

Sydney Bauer is a journalist who covers international sports.

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The Olympic ban is a necessary counter to Moscow’s abuse.