The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing are here, and while we don’t exactly have a lot of winter sports here, we’ve found every winter Olympian from the South who is competing this year.
109 events will be held at the Beijing Games, with 223 Americans scheduled to compete. It’s the second-highest number of athletes sent to represent Team USA at the Winter Olympics (behind the 228 who went to Pyeongchang in 2018). However, only 15 of this year’s athletes come from southern states. Since many of these states don’t exactly have the reputation we do for giving off a wintery feel, this isn’t entirely surprising.
We’re calling the “South” anything from Virginia and below, as well as anywhere from Texas to the East Coast. That’s the following states, with the number of athletes in parenthesis: Virginia (3), W. Virginia (0), Kentucky (0), Tennessee (0), North Carolina (0), South Carolina (1), Georgia (1), Florida (7), Alabama (0), Mississippi (0), Louisiana (0), Arkansas (0), Texas (3) and Oklahoma (0). It’s arbitrary, sure, but we’re the one putting together the list, so that’s what we’ll go with. For comparison’s sake, California has the most with 29. They are followed by Colorado and Minnesota (23 each), Utah (16), Illinois (13), and Wisconsin (12).
Sadly, North Carolina did not qualify anyone for these games. We did really well with athletes in the Summer Games last year though. So don’t worry about it. But there are still a number of excellent U.S. Winter Olympians coming from our friendly regional counterparts. Let’s take a look at who they are, and what they’ll be doing in Beijing.
