Winter Olympic Games to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, and the host of the 2026 Winter Olympics will be selected on June 23rd, 2019. , no city in the southern hemisphere has applied to host the cold-weather-dependent Winter Olympics, which are held in February at the height of the southern hemisphere summer. To date, twelve countries have participated in every Winter Olympic Games – Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. Six of those countries have earned medals at every Winter Olympic Games – Austria, Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the United States. The
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