Discover the 70 countries that have never won a single medal at the Summer Games

You won’t be surprised to find some small countries on this list. But other demographic behemoths may surprise you.

The formula is well-known, but it is still true at the Paris Olympics. The number of participating countries, 206, exceeds the number of UN members (only 193). And for the representatives of a third of them, it will be a question of putting an end to a historic absence from the competition’s list of winners: 70 countries have not won a single medal at the Summer Olympics as the Parisian fortnight begins on Friday, July 26.

Of course, geopolitical vicissitudes explain part of the blank records. South Sudan, a country admitted to the Olympic family in 2015, lacked time to shine, in addition to a delicate geopolitical context, just like Tuvalu (if you look, it’s in Oceania), which has been able to participate in the Games since 2017. Accepted in 2014, Kosovo has already won three gold medals, in 2016 and 2021.

Others have already seen some of their representatives climb onto the podiums… but when it didn’t count. Special mention for Nepal, medalist in taekwondo in Seoul (1988), when the discipline was invited as an exhibition, and rejected for a medal in mountaineering awarded in the heroic times when there was a very broad acceptance of Olympism (in Paris in 1924).

The same punishment went to Monaco, a victim of the IOC’s tidying up of the records, which stripped it of its only Olympic medal won in an artistic event the same year. Liechtenstein has the distinction of only having won medals in the powder snow of the Winter Games. The Alpine country is the only one in this case, while around a hundred countries are in the opposite situation, with the Winter Games involving fewer athletes and countries (91 delegations in Beijing in 2022).

Finally, some saw their best chance to shine as swapping their passport for that of another country. The most striking example: Sierra Leonean Eunice Barber, who achieved the best performance of all time for her country with a fifth place in the heptathlon in 1996, before turning to France, for which she won five world medals.

Among the main curiosities, the presence of very populated countries, such as Bangladesh (170 million inhabitants) or the Democratic Republic of Congo (96 million inhabitants) does not fail to raise questions, even if the absence of causality between demography and titles has been demonstrated by the Indian paradox, only 35 medals in 34 Olympics.

For comparison, microscopic San Marino won its first three Olympic medals in Tokyo in 2021, making it the record holder for medals per capita for the previous edition. Turkmenistan and Burkina Faso also broke their counters at this edition, enough to inspire athletes from the empty-handed nations.