Fiji at the 2002 Winter Olympics Fiji at the 2002 Winter Olympics Fiji sent a delegation to compete at the 2002 Winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States from February 8–24, 2002. This was the nation's third appearance at a Winter Olympic Games. The delegation consisted of a single athlete, alpine skier Laurence Thoms. He competed in both the slalom, where he failed to complete his first run, and in the giant slalom, in which he finished 55th out of the 57 skiers who successfully completed both of their runs. Thoms gained media attention for representing a tropical nation at the Winter Olympics. Fiji
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