On February 13 1980, Zhao Weichang, a national champion speed skater who had broken Chinese national records 26 times, carried the PRC flag into a stadium packed with 30,000 people in Lake Placid, New York, at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games. He knew the importance of the occasion: “The whole stadium was filled with enthusiastic applause and cheers, to welcome China back into the Olympic family. I was extremely moved; this was the highest honor,” Zhao recalled in an interview with the state-backed Xinhua News Agency in 2021.

The Chinese team of 28 competitors, led by Zhao and entering ahead of Costa Rica (another country making its debut at the Games), were the first from the PRC to attend a Winter Olympics—this was the first time in 28 years that the five-star flag of the PRC had flown at any Olympic Games in summer or winter. It marked the return of the PRC to Olympic sports since it began a boycott in the 1950s in protest when the Games included athletes from Taiwan, competing as “Republic of China.”

Over 40 years later, China’s capital is hosting the 24th edition of the Olympics, becoming the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Games. Whereas Chinese athletes had to share secondhand equipment donated by Japan to compete in the 1980s, Beijing now welcomes athletes around the world with state-of-the-art ski resorts, training facilities, and world-class competition venues. The country has won its largest-ever Winter Olympic Games medal haul, and boasts of getting 300 million of its population engaged in winter sports ahead of the Games, according to official figures. It has been a tumultuous journey, in sporting as well as political terms.

When legendary figure skater Yao Bin first started ice skating as a boy in the 1960s, there were no indoor rinks in his hometown of Harbin, Heilongjiang province. Instead, in the winter, Yao would wake up at 4 a.m., endure temperatures as low as minus-20 Celsius, and head for frozen lakes to take advantage of the best conditions on the ice. In the summer, skating was impossible, so he focused only on improving his fitness via running, as he explained in an interview with Xgame.com, a winter sports website, in 2020. Meanwhile, early professional skiers in China had to hike up snowy slopes to practice, as there were no ski areas with chairlifts in the country.

Politics was another formidable barrier for China’s winter athletes. After the PRC attended its first Olympic Games in Helsinki in the summer of 1952, the country boycotted the competition over the International Olympic Committee’s decision to let the team from Taiwan compete at the Games. That meant the PRC also missed out on the Winter Olympics from then to 1980, while athletes from Taiwan went in 1972 and 1976, though they failed to win any medals.

During that time, winter sports in the PRC were only just emerging, and were practiced almost exclusively in the frigid northeast of the country. China’s first official national skiing competition was held in 1957 in Tonghua, Jilin province, though there was no ski “resort” there to speak of at that time. When China finally made it to Lake Placid in 1980, four of the country’s 28 competitors hailed from Tonghua.

But while national-level competitions were held regularly after that, opportunities for PRC winter athletes to compete abroad were limited, and the political climate at home even made some sports risky: “In the 1970s, we were almost labeled counter-revolutionaries!” Yao told news website Hinews in 2010. “We were performing in Beijing, and some central government leaders said to us, ‘You can only skate forward. Why do you skate backward? That’s falling behind; history can’t be reversed.’”

Yao and his skating partner Luan Bo were among the first generation of Chinese professional figure skaters and the first to attend an international competition. They competed at the World Figure Skating Championship in Dortmund, Germany, in 1980—and finished last.

China gradually opened up diplomatic channels with the outside world starting in the 1970s, gaining a seat at United Nations in 1971 and normalizing relations with the US in 1979. In tandem with thawing relations, the IOC eventually voted to have athletes from Taiwan compete as Chinese Taipei, paving the way for the Chinese Olympic Committee, based in Beijing, to return to the IOC in late 1979, less than four months before the Lake Placid Winter Games were scheduled to start in the US.