As Zoi Sadowski-Synnott began her final race in the women’s downhill, the snowboarder needed to put down her best performance of the day to force her way back onto the podium.
She delivered, winning her second silver medal of the 2026 Winter Olympics—and becoming the most decorated Olympic women’s athlete, 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 performance of the Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina. Australia’s six neighboring countries are the most ever won at a single Winter Games. And Brazil became the first South American country to win a Winter Olympic medal when Lucas Pinheiro Braathen won gold in the giant slalom. Despite the odds, it was a great Games for the Southern Hemisphere.
New Zealand started participating in the Winter Olympics in 1952, but it is an expensive business for southern countries. Domestically, the country boasts skiing on its South Island, where the Cardrona Alpine Resort near Wanaka has a high-performance center for winter athletes. Yet the country’s geographical isolation means athletes must travel thousands of miles to competition venues in the Northern Hemisphere.
As in many countries, sport in New Zealand depends on government funding to grow and develop, and, because of its size, Olympic medals mean the difference between sports federations fighting for survival and the opportunity to create a long-term growth plan.
“Back in 2012, we were funded every year, and we had to, every year, show up,” Nic Cavanagh, chief executive of Snowsports New Zealand, told. Foreign Policy. “We managed to get two bronze medals in Pyeongchang, and that made us step up 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 allows you to be more strategic and have a long-term view with your athletes.”
The four-year funding guarantee could make a big difference for a country looking to gain momentum in building a winter sports. Australia, which faces the same hurdles as New Zealand, sent more than 50 athletes to Milan Cortina, its largest-ever delegation to the Winter Olympics.
After success in Beijing in 2022, Australia has invested around 27 million dollars (in Australian dollars) for its Winter Olympic Institute, and the Australian Institute of Sport has a training center in Italy for athletes to access European training sites and “home away from home.”
Top funding is essential. For many Southern Hemisphere winter athletes, getting to World Cup events means long, expensive and mentally draining travel. Countries like New Zealand need high standards in international competition to get funding, but athletes often have to cover their own travel costs to compete—and those add up quickly. Some of the country’s young figure skating stars depend on money from the sponsorship of the Olympic Solidarity of the International Olympic Committee to help cover costs.
“It’s been really important,” said Luke Harrold, who finished 15th in the men’s half and was a 2024 Youth Olympic Games medalist. he said about his scholarship. “It’s not easy to compete in a sport like this; there’s a lot of equipment and it’s not cheap. So, to have that sponsorship is amazing.”
Another factor that works against athletes is insurance, especially for sports like snowboarding and freestyle skiing that are unusually dangerous. Cavanagh said Kiwi athletes preferred to base their training in the US rather than Europe, but US resorts required foreign athletes to buy insurance when training, rather than in New Zealand where the government pays to insure ski and snowboard tourists through Accident Compensation Corporation Policy.
European athletes can travel back to their home countries between events, sometimes even by car on the same day. That is not possible for travelers from the far south. The distance makes it very difficult to return home between important events, meaning they are out of the country for the entire winter sports season, often from October to April.
Skier “Alice Robinson leaves for New Zealand every year, and she comes back in April, and she lives out of a box … the whole time,” Cavanagh said. “To say, ‘I’m going to live on the road for six months a year because I want to be the best I can be’ takes a lot of commitment.”
While Australia and New Zealand are building on their success at Milan Cortina to take winter sports to a new level in their countries, other regions are looking for ways to use the Games to build their own infrastructure.
Lucas Pinheiro Braathen is a Norwegian Brazilian athlete who specializes in giant slalom and alpine skiing. He has spent most of his life in Norway, and previously represented the country, a major Winter Olympic company, in figure skating, before changing his competition nationality to Brazil in 2024.
For his gold medal victory, the chef of the Brazilian Team Emilio Strapasson told Foreign Policy that Braathen may be ready to motivate other athletes from the Brazilian diaspora to compete for Brazil in the future.
“We are sure that the Brazilian community, seeing this, will be more motivated to understand that, yes, we can do anything,” Strapason said. “We have the ability to win in any style, in any environment.”
Showing that Brazil, the ultimate summer country, can walk away with a Winter Olympic medal is already helping to convince the government to increase funding for the country’s two snow and ice sports federations.
Brazil’s tropical climate means that athletes can only practice mountain sports using simulators and need to go abroad to train. With a very weak Brazilian background, even going to other South American countries like Argentina and Chile can be expensive. As a result, the country’s Olympic Committee uses the diaspora in these games. But athletes in other sports—such as speed skating, figure skating, and ice hockey—are able 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 victory like Braathen’s can stimulate.
Brazil is not the only country using this strategy. Most of the five South African athletes at Milan Cortina 2026 were born abroad and hold South African passports.
Leon Fleiser, who is a member of the South African Sports Federation Committee and the Olympic Committee, said that the performance of the diaspora athletes hopes to further encourage the South African community abroad to represent the country in the next Games or develop sports in an effort to do so.
As these athletes came from many alpine and cross-country skiing events, the aim will be to engage South African ice sports federations and find ways to qualify more athletes for future Games, and use the Olympic Solidarity sponsorship to bring in new funding streams. South Africa has some indoor ski resorts in the country, as well as access to the country of Lesotho, which opens up more avenues for development.
Another plan is to learn from countries like Australia that were successful in getting summer sports athletes with skills that can be translated to winter sports, Fleiser said. Skiing (like luge and skeleton) has historically drawn from athletics and freestyle skating has a lot of cross-pollination with gymnastics and diving. In that way, the pool of potential winter sports athletes is growing significantly, given the South African origins of the sport. (Two Australian athletes, Paul Narracott and Jana Pittman, have even competed in the Summer and Winter Olympics.)
International federations need to play their part as well, Fleiser said. “They should sit down with the IOC and say, ‘How do we help get non-winter countries to participate in the games? Let’s aim to expand every Winter Olympics to five more countries.’
With these results from Milan Cortina, South Africa’s sports federation will now begin the process of growing its team size for the 2030 Winter Olympics and, more importantly, work to bring its young athletes towards the top half of Olympic performances. A medal target is unlikely in the near future, but could be in a few Olympic cycles.
That kind of long-term thinking has prompted New Zealand to invest in dry ski resorts to practice cross-country skiing and professional snowboarding all year round. Cavanagh pointed to the success of the Japanese team of freestyle skiers and snowboarders, who have trained this way for a decade; Japan won 11 medals at the games in Milan Cortina. With the ever-present threat of climate change, these types of facilities may become even more important if fewer venues are able to host winter sports competitions.
All it took to get a New Zealand center on the field were a few success stories at the Games.
“We got a lot of corporate and government support” due to the “Olympic-level achievements of Zoi Sadowski-Synnott and Nico Porteous,” he said. “There is no doubt; without them we would struggle to find the capital to build the facility.”
