When Lucas Pinheiro Braathen stood on the top step in Italy, becoming the first South American to win a Winter Olympic medal, he framed the moment personally and politically. Born to a Brazilian mother and a Norwegian father and competing for Norway at the 2022 Winter Games, Braathen urged Brazilians to see difference as strength — a reminder that modern athletes often bridge multiple national ties.
His victory reignited a familiar debate about what it means to represent a country at the Olympics. Scholars and commentators point to several forces that shape how nationality is understood in sport, and why it remains contested.
Multiple stakeholders shape sporting nationality
Gijsbert Oonk, a professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam who studies global history, sport and athlete migration, argues that a range of actors governs ideas of belonging in sport. Athletes themselves want to reach the highest level of competition, but their choices can split loyalties: a ‘‘sending’’ country may have funded their development, while a ‘‘receiving’’ country gains prestige and medals when the athlete wins. Sports federations try to set fair rules for competition, and audiences seek heroes they can claim as their own.
Oonk notes that states have long granted citizenship, but increasingly some governments offer expedited procedures for athletes that ordinary applicants do not receive. ‘‘There is a contest over who gets to decide belonging,’’ he says, as political and sporting interests intersect.
The pull to compete
Karen McGarry, an associate professor at McMaster University who studies the anthropology of sport, says practical incentives often determine athletes’ choices. Competitors move to where resources, coaching, funding or clearer paths to selection exist. She points to ice dancer Laurence Fournier Beaudry, who has represented Canada, Denmark and now France, as an example of how athletes navigate changing opportunities. Some fans see such moves as self-interested; others regard them as routine decisions in professional sport.
The International Olympic Committee requires athletes who have represented one country at the Olympics or certain major international events to wait three years before competing for another nation, but shifts in politics and economics complicate how nationality operates in practice. Media reports noted that more than 30 athletes who left Russia competed for other countries in Italy this year, illustrating the scale of contemporary transfers.
Politics and public reaction
McGarry adds that geopolitical tensions and rising nationalism can harden public and media attitudes toward athletes’ national affiliations. Sport does not exist in a vacuum: stories like that of Ukrainian Winter Olympian Vladyslav Heraskevych show how geopolitics and athletic identity can collide, shaping who is embraced or viewed suspiciously.
An individual-centered origin
Switching national allegiances is not new, but the prominence of nation-states in the Olympic project grew over time. Early modern Olympic thinking emphasized the individual competitor more than national representation. As Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a founder of the IOC, put it, the early ideal celebrated the individual athlete — a perspective that, while dated in other respects, underscores how the Games’ national framing was not inevitable.
Gradually, states assumed responsibility for selecting and funding athletes, and symbols such as flags and anthems became central. The emergence of the medal table in the 1920s and 1930s — as the Games grew and international rivalries intensified — further entrenched a nation-based view of success.
The commercial and cultural value of nationality
Even as migration and cross-border training have increased since the 1980s, nationality retains cultural and commercial value. McGarry notes that nationalism has market worth: sponsors and broadcasters often promote athletes as ‘‘homegrown’’ to tap nostalgia and national pride. That marketing shapes which athletes are celebrated and how their stories are told.
Audience perception matters
How the public sees an athlete can determine whether they are accepted. Oonk points out that audiences are shaped by national languages, education and media narratives, which help create what scholars call an ‘‘imagined community’’ — a sense of belonging to a group that most members will never meet. People may cheer for someone they do not personally know simply because that athlete seems to belong to their national community.
At the same time, from a more individualist perspective, athletes are people trying to perform at their best regardless of which flag they wear. That tension — between collective identification and individual aspiration — lies at the heart of debates about nationality at the Games.
What comes next
With multiple stakeholders, historical legacies and shifting identities in play, debates about Olympic nationality are likely to continue. While some political currents push toward exclusionary nationalism, many people increasingly experience identity as transnational and fluid. The Olympics, as a global stage where personal stories intersect with national narratives, will keep prompting questions about what it really means to represent a country.
Edited by Chuck Penfold