1984 Winter Olympics session of the International Olympic Committee in Athens, Greece. Sarajevo was selected over Sapporo, Japan (which hosted the games 12 years earlier) by a margin of three votes. Gothenburg was the first city in Sweden to lose a Winter Olympics bid, as other Swedish cities such as Falun and Östersund would later lose their consecutive bids to Calgary, Albertville, Lillehammer, Nagano, and Salt Lake City respectively. Sarajevo, capital of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, was part of the united Yugoslavia at the time. The torch relay for the 1984 Winter Olympics started in Olympia and then proceeded by airplane to Dubrovnik.
Tropical nations at the Winter Olympics Tropical nations at the Winter Olympics Several tropical nations have participated in the Winter Olympics despite not having the climate for winter sports. Partly because of that, their entries are a subject of human interest stories during the Games. No tropical nation has ever won a Winter Olympic medal. The first warm-weather, but not tropical, nation participating in the Winter Olympics was Mexico. Much of Mexico is at a latitude north of the Tropic of Cancer, and most of the country has a subtropical highland or semi-arid climate, so it is not exclusively a tropical nation. Nonetheless, Mexico made its