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Snowboarder Su Yiming pumped his fists in celebration as he claimed a gold medal this week at the Winter Olympics in Italy, a personal triumph that also ended a 12-day wait for a Chinese athlete to top the podium.
China has become a formidable Olympic force over the past two decades, vying with the US and the leading European nations at the top of Summer Games medal tables as part of a state-backed drive to project national strength through sporting excellence.
But despite sending its biggest-ever squad to an overseas Winter Games, China’s athletes have struggled at Milano Cortina 2026. The country had won just four golds by the end of Friday, two days before the end of the Games.
That is well short of the haul at the home Winter Olympics in Beijing four years ago, when Chinese athletes topped the podium on a record nine occasions.
Milano Cortina highlights the uphill battle that China faces in establishing itself as a winter sports powerhouse, despite vast investment in infrastructure and encouragement from the top echelons of government.
“It’s a reversion to form,” Victor Matheson, a sports economist at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, said of China’s showing, noting the country’s limited winter sports pedigree before hosting the 2022 games. “Beijing was the least likely Winter Olympics host in history.”
China’s gold drought in Italy comes despite a drive to raise the popularity of winter sports in the country. President Xi Jinping, a keen skater as a child, set a goal of engaging 300mn Chinese people in winter sports — a target state media has said was exceeded by 2024.
The country has built some of the world’s biggest indoor ski and snowboard centres, with Beijing promoting a “snow and ice economy” as part of a push to boost domestic consumption.
China burnished its sporting credentials as host of the Beijing Summer Games in 2008, securing a record 48 golds at a lavishly financed event that showcased the country’s ambitions and economic muscle.
David Fletcher, a professor at the UK’s Loughborough University, a leading centre of sports research, said China followed that up with strong showings at the Games in subsequent summers. But he questioned whether Beijing had the same commitment to enduring success in winter sports.
“They do seem to value the Summer Games, as they’ve been consistently near the top of the medals table since hosting it in 2008,” Fletcher said. “It would be interesting to get a better understanding of to what extent they value the Winter Olympics.”
Beijing appears aware of the country’s limitations on snow and ice, with a report in the official news agency Xinhua late last year warning of the difficulties Chinese athletes faced when competing on the world stage.
“There is still a considerable gap between us and the leading winter sports nations, and our preparations for the Milan Winter Olympics remain challenging,” Li Jing, deputy head of the country’s General Administration of Sport, was quoted as saying.
An article published by the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party tabloid, this month warned against inflated medal expectations, saying the nation should focus on sustainable advances over fleeting glory. “Rationality ensures the flame of progress burns steadily, paving the way for future dominance,” it said.
The strong squad that travelled to Italy included double Olympic champion Eileen Gu, a megastar of Chinese sport and one of the highest-earning female athletes in the world. But Gu was unable to match the achievements that made her the poster girl of Beijing 2022. China also missed out on golds in other sports in which it has a record, such as speed skating.
“I’m the most decorated female free skier in history,” US-born Gu replied when asked if the pair of silvers she won in Milano Cortina were two golds lost. “The ‘two medals lost’ situation — to be quite frank with you — I think is kind of a ridiculous perspective,” the 22-year-old added.
Fletcher at Loughborough University said home advantage went some way to explaining why China had outperformed at Beijing 2022 but struggled in Italy.
“There’s a consistent statistical advantage of having the home games and a number of reasons why,” he explained, listing psychological benefits such as familiar surroundings, culture and timezone, and the boost from a home crowd and proximity to loved ones.
Fletcher also pointed out how winning a gold medal often came down to tiny margins.
“Performance in sport is influenced by such an array of factors — psychological preparation, nutritional preparation, the physiological aspects of the sport, the technical aspect of the sport — that landing an athlete at the top of the podium at a certain point in time is really difficult,” he said.
Despite the challenges, Matheson at College of the Holy Cross believed “the future to be bright” for China’s programme, noting the country was “one of the very few places in the world that’s making a huge surge in participation in winter sports”.
“A kid who took up skiing after the Winter Olympics in 2022 is not winning medals for you this year, but that kid might win medals for you in another ten years,” he said. “You don’t turn a country with no winter sports culture into Norway or Switzerland overnight.”
