Renewables + energy storage tech are good enough substitutes
Solar and wind are already significantly cheaper just in cash terms than any other form of energy generation. Hydroelectric, geothermal, and tidal are more expensive than gas but offer none of the carbon drawbacks once construction is complete. Nuclear is significantly more expensive, has significant drawbacks in terms of waste management and the carbon cost of construction is very high but is "always on".
Basically, there is neither an environmental case for fossil fuels and there's no longer an economic one either, and the gap is widening each year as battery and generation technology advances.
Same as Mandelson, as much as we all might want it, we're a very long way away from having enough evidence to prosecute Andrew for his crimes against women and girls.
Population size is of second tier importance behind economic factors, and the effect isn't linear, but an "inverted u" where tiny nations suffer, mid-size to larger nations do better but very large countries fall off due to lack of resources to continually scale investment into ever larger talent pools.
The winter Olympics throws the economic needs of elite sport into sharp focus because unlike athletics, most winter sports require more money for equipment, facilities, training etc to develop high end athletes, poorer countries punch above their weight in things like long-distance running where it's relatively cheap to train an athlete compared to alpine skiing or ice hockey. Hence why the winter Olympics is dominated by wealthy countries almost all of which are either in Europe, North America or China/Korea/Japan.
The only outliers to that are Brazil who had a downhill skier who competed his whole career for Norway before retiring and deciding to compete again under a different flag and Kazakhstan who (no disrespect to his performance) won because the favourites all unexpectedly messed up.
You don't know a single thing about what I may or may not have done about any of those issues. Like you don't know if I've been on anti-war and anti-fascist marches, contacted representatives, asked questions at town-halls or anything else. But fuck me for posting a comment online right? What a nazi apologist I must be.
Maybe I should rephrase, Norway's sports development system works on a broad spectrum approach based on sports that have universal availability and appeal within the country. All the sports you mentioned, and cross-country skiing, biathlon, ski jump etc don't require dedicated specialist facilities like ice hockey does for example.
That philosophy also happens to align very nicely with a natural affinity for, and infrastructure to develop top end talent in for those winter sports I mentioned.
The article ignores every other factor and purely focuses on population size, economics will always defeat population size when it comes to finding and developing elite athletes.
And please can we go just five minutes without bringing nazis and genocide into every conversation, it's exhausting.
Norway also target sports that have large numbers of available medals that they also have a historic affinity with ie cross country skiing (36 medals total, 14 won), biathlon (33 total, 11 won), ski jump (19 total, 5 won).
Norway is also incredibly wealthy and invests very heavily in its winter Olympic athletes where USA, obviously dramatically richer has to spread its resources across winter Olympics, summer Olympics and a whole host of sports that aren't even in the Olympics.
Good Luck.
You could just pirate them, or nows the perfect time to (re)discover the Xbox 360 with how great the modding scene has become lately.