Mali as an Olympic Competitor

For my research paper, I will be focusing on sports in Mali specifically along with some of the history and current issues the country is facing in sports. I wanted to share a little bit of information about Mali's Olympic experience since the Olympics is the largest sporting competition held every four years. To this day, Mali has never won an Olympic medal of any sort since their first appearance in the games in the summer of 1964 in Tokyo. Mali sends very few athletes to the Olympic games when they come around. In 2016, there were only 6 athletes that competed for Mali in Rio. The numbers are microscopic in size when looking at the 558 American athletes that participated. Mali has yet to compete in the winter Olympic games, my guess is this is solely relying on the fact is there are no ski resorts in Mali for the people to have access to even learn winter sports like skiing and snowboarding. The only Olympic sports that Mali had competed in during the Rio games were Judo, Swimming and Taekwondo. Have you mad the connection with these sports yet?.... Yes, they are all sports that are not composed of teams but of the individual athletes. This is for the fact that the country of Mali cannot fund to send their athletes to compete in the olympics therefore the athletes that compete for the country train and fund all of their own athletic training. There is talk in recent articles that more African countries are growing in Olympic participants. Hopefully this will be true for Mali as well so they are able to represent the small country they are in the Olympic Games!