Pretty simple really, our best athletes gravitate to other sports.
Austria typically dominates in skiing because they treat it like we treat hockey, the lack of medals in the early stages of the olympics was front page news and a total disaster for them. The sport museum in Helsinki has a large display dedicated to a former ski jumper like we would have to Gretzky, and the Austrian guy who seems to always win ski jumping gets met by massive crowds at the airport. When a sport is elevated to that level in a nation athletes will gravitate towards it, it becomes the thing that young people want to be involved in. We have that in different sports, you can't expect to have it in every sport without mass funding (which is the US model).
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