Nepal at the 2002 Winter Olympics Olympic competition at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The nation did not take part in the next Summer Olympics, but have participated in every Summer Olympic Games since the 1972 edition. Despite this, these Salt Lake City Games were their first appearance in the Winter Olympic Games, and they have never won an Olympic medal as of 2018. The 2002 Winter Olympics were held from 8–24 February 2002; a total of 2,399 athletes took part representing 77 National Olympic Committees. The only athlete sent by Nepal to the Salt Lake Olympics was Jay Khadka, competing in cross-country skiing. He
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