Winter Olympics: Racist Games - white as the driven snow itself ...

Kenyan giant slalom skier Sabrina Simader is one of the few black faces among moneyed and monochrome elite. Photo / Getty Images

Despite the efforts of a few black pioneers, winter sports remain the preserve of a white elite, writes Oliver Brown.

It is a self-evident truth that Winter Olympians tend, much like the scenery they inhabit, to be as white as the driven snow. Rarely, save perhaps on Oscar nominations day, does one encounter a collective of such glaring, ethnic homogeneity. Of the 66 starters in the women's giant slalom in PyeongChang yesterday, just one was black: Kenya's Sabrina Simader, competing long after the TV networks had packed up, finishing almost 13 seconds outside winner Mikaela Shiffrin's time. "At the beginning of my career, people looked at me," she said. "As a black skier, you always get looked at."

At first glance, this appears no more pernicious than a quirk of history. Traditionally, the Winter Games have stuck fast to their Scandinavian lineage, while drawing their most bankable stars from alpine countries or the affluent Rocky Mountains regions of the US. Scratch deeper, however, and one finds other reasons for describing this event as the final frontier for diversity in sport.

In recent days, a video has gone viral of Surya Bonaly, a black French figure skater who at Nagano 1998 caused astonishment by performing a backflip and landing on one blade. Maximum marks all round? Sadly not - Bonaly was disqualified. The move had been banned since the Innsbruck Games of 1976, when American Terry Kubicka unleashed the same trick (hitting the ice on two blades, mind), only for judges to deem it invalid. Be in no doubt, though, that Bonaly staged a trick in part out of a conviction that she was not being assessed on her exceptional skating prowess alone. "I don't know if race made it more difficult, but it definitely made me stronger," she said later, in the documentary Rebel on Ice. "I knew that I had no excuse for making mistakes, because maybe I wouldn't be accepted as a white person would."

So, are the Winter Olympics racist? That would be tarring with far too broad a brush - although it was unpalatable to see how Irina Rodnina, who lit the Olympic torch in Sochi four years ago, later tweeted an image of a banana superimposed upon Barack Obama. The problem is that they are so overwhelmingly white. While there are boasts of these Pyeongchang Games being the "most African" yet, with 15 countries represented, that still leaves 39 of the continent's nations with nobody at all.

This includes countries with ski resorts. Lesotho has a ski area at Afriski but has never put a Winter Olympian forward. Even a society with the sporting muscle of South Africa has barely bothered, having just entered its first competitor in alpine skiing. Sive Speelman, who rose from a poor background in the Eastern Cape and who learned his craft through a ski club at school, qualified for Sochi but was denied entry by the national sports authority, who thought him too slow. "It broke my heart," he said. Thankfully, the snub only emboldened him to make the journey to South Korea.

Kenyan giant slalom skier Sabrina Simader is one of the few black faces among moneyed and monochrome elite. Photo / Getty Images

It matters, profoundly, that these athletes are recognised as trailblazers. Take the words of Jazmine Fenlator-Victorian, a member of this year's Jamaican bobsleigh team. "It's important to me that little girls and boys see someone who looks like them, talks like them, has the same culture as them, has crazy curly hair and who wears it natural, who has brown skin, included in different things in this world," she said, choking back tears.

The accepted socio-ethnic profile for a Winter Olympian needs adjusting - fast - if the Games want to be taken seriously as a global event. For decades, it has been largely due to the deluge of American television money, NBC's deal as the official Olympic broadcaster is worth an eye-watering $10.4 billion, that the winter showpiece has survived. Even Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, had trouble believing they had a future, caricaturing winter sports in 1921 as the "snobbish play of the rich".

Today, competitors from places lacking an alpine tradition have a fiendishly hard time even reaching this stage. Ghana's Akwasi Frimpong only amassed the money to fund his dream to be a skeleton racer by selling vacuum cleaners, while his fellow pioneer, Jamaica's Anthony Watson, rejected a Broadway role in The Lion King so that he could prepare properly for PyeongChang.

Neither of them lose sight of what it is, ultimately, they are fighting for. "This thing is bigger than ourselves," Frimpong said. "We want to do something that can outlive us."

Racial and cultural background forms far more than just a subtext here. It did not take much, for example, to read the mind of Shani Davis, one of a handful of black athletes in the US team, after the speed-skater was passed over as flag-bearer for the opening ceremony on a coin toss. "No problem, I can wait until 2022," he wrote on Twitter.

On the surface, Olympic organisers would prefer you to believe there is no problem. After all, six nations, including Eritrea and Kosovo, are involved for the first time.

The underlying stories of resentment and struggle, though, offer a powerful reminder of how much further the Winter Olympics must go to escape their straitjacket as the preserve of a moneyed and monochrome elite.