After winning gold in Italy, becoming the first South American to win a Winter Olympic medal, Lucas Pinheiro Braathen said: “I just hope that Brazilians look at this and truly understand that your difference is your superpower.”

Pinheiro Braathen, who competed for Norway in the 2022 Winter Olympics and is the son of a Brazilian mother and a Norwegian father, is far from the only athlete with mixed nationality. However, his success reignited a long-standing debate about nationality and identity at the Olympics.

The five factors affecting Olympic nationality

Gijsbert Oonk is a professor at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam who specializes in global history, sport and the migration of athletes and national identity. The Dutchman says there are several important stakeholders to consider when discussing nationality in sport.

Individual athletes want to compete at the top level, but may find themselves caught between a sending state which wants to retain them after investiging in their training and career, and a receiving state that might challenge a medal and thereby increase its prestige. Then there are the sports federations which wish to create a level playing field on the international stage, and the audiences who want to feel connected to their sporting heroes.

“There is a competition on who decides on belonging,” Oonk told DW.

“States provide you with citizenship, but now in sports, states increasingly provide certain fast-track citizenship procedures that normal people don’t have access to.”

Karen McGarry is an associate professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who specializes in the anthropology of sport. McGarry believes one of the most decisive factors is the desire to compete at the elite level.

“In international sporting competitions like the Olympics, athletes will increasingly move to whatever country provides them with the most resources, incentives or chances of competitive success,” McGarry told DW.

“The current French Olympic champion in ice dancing, Laurence Fournier Beaudry, has competed for Canada, Denmark and France. Some fans view such practices as selfish, overly individualistic, or not in keeping with a more sociocentric ‘Olympic’ mentality that position the ‘nation’ at the heart of the competition, others are indifferent.”

The International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) charter states that an athlete who has represented one country at the Olympics or another major international competition must wait three years before representing another.

But as socio-economic and political climates change, so does the perception of nationality, particularly in sport. According to a news report in The Moscow Times, over 30 Russian athletes who changed their sporting nationality are competing for other countries in Italy this month.

“I’m from Canada, for instance, and Canadian patriotism and nationalism is currently very high, largely as a form of resistance to threats of tariffs and political takeover from (US president) Donald Trump,” McGarry explained.

“When political tensions escalate, for instance, nations often become insular, exclusionary, and nationalistic, which can spill over to the Olympic games, particular with reference to media coverage.”

Ukrainian Winter Olympian Vladislav Heraskevych’s story may be another example of this.

Individual athlete at the forefront to start

Changing nationality is not a new phenomenon. Perhaps more interesting is that the notion of representing nations is not what the Olympics was founded on.

“In the beginning there were obviously no regulations,” Oonk said. “The whole idea was that actually, athletes should represent themselves, not a country or a king.”

Indeed, it was Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the co-founder of the IOC, who said: “The true Olympic hero is, in my view, the individual adult male.”

While his idea in terms of gender is outdated, the focus on the athlete rather than the nation is intriguing. But eventually countries were asked to select their best athletes and send them, and that’s when things began to change.

“And here you see the countries coming in, with their interests, financial and political aspects, and the importance of the flag and the hymn,” Oonk explained.

Furthermore, Oonk believes the media creation of the medal table, which came along during the 1920s and 30s when the Olympics started to become more accepted as an event and the competition between the United States and the British became more intense, also aided the development of competition between nations.

Nevertheless, even in the face of increased migration from the 1980s onwards and the mobility of international athletes in terms of training and development, the cultural construct of nationality has remained valuable.

“Nationality and nationalism have a market value in domestic contexts,” McGarry said.

“Olympic corporate sponsors, for instance, recognize the value of showcasing their athletes as ‘homegrown’ athletes to appeal to a certain kind of domestic nostalgia for ‘national’ athletes.”

Audience role not to be underestimated

Perception is not to be underestimated. The way the world views an athlete plays a huge role in either being accepted or dismissed.

“Audiences are very nationalized because they are fed by the national language and the national media,” said Oonk, who added that the way national history is taught in schools also plays a key role.

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“The idea of nationality and belonging is kind of hyped into what in academic areas we call an imagined community. ‘I don’t know that sports person, but he’s one of us, he speaks my language… However, from a really academic and more philosophical point, who cares? These are individual athletes trying to do their best and trying to skate as fast or whatever as they can.”

Ultimately, with so many factors at playthis debate promises to continue to burn brightly in the years ahead. Right now marks perhaps a real reflection point when it comes to what it means to represent a country at the Olympics.

“It’s an interesting time because, while we are seeing the rise of populism and insular forms of nationalism on the global political stage, we also see that many people increasingly view their identities as cosmopolitan and fluid, including national affiliations,” noted McGarry.

Edited: by Chuck Penfold