Tajikistan at the 2002 Winter Olympics Tajikistan at the 2002 Winter Olympics Tajikistan sent a delegation to compete in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, United States, held 8–24 February 2002. This was Tajikistan's first time participating in a Winter Olympic Games. The country sent one representative, alpine skier Andrey Drygin. He failed to finish either of his events. The National Olympic Committee of the Republic of Tajikistan (NOC) was first recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1993, and Tajikistan made its Olympic debut at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. The nation was making its Winter Olympic Games debut in these Salt
Winter Olympic Games 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