“When you grow up and you don’t see that, you feel that you can’t do it and that is not right,” she said. “So coming back home to Jamaica, I wanted my Jamaican people to see that they can do it … if they want to be a winter Olympian and do Alpine ski, now they see their fellow Jamaican in the Winter Olympics.”

Nearly 3,000 athletes from 92 countries are competing in the Pyeongchang Olympics. Six of those nations — Ecuador, Eritrea, Kosovo, Malaysia, Nigeria and Singapore — are competing in the Winter Olympics for the first time.

Asia has also become a major force in the Olympics movement as the host for the next two Games after Pyeongchang. The next Summer Olympics will be held in Tokyo in 2020, and the next Winter Olympics will be held in Beijing in 2022.

For its part, the United States Olympic Committee said that its team is the most diverse it has fielded at a Winter Olympics.

Of the 243 athletes, 10 are African-American and 10 are Asian-American. The U.S.O.C. does not release data on other racial and ethnic groups because the national governing bodies for individual sports collect and report the data and have done so inconsistently (the sports ask but do not require athletes to report their racial and ethnic identities).

Jason Thompson, the director of diversity and inclusion at the committee, said progress has been made in fielding a more diverse team, but that more needs to be done to recruit athletes across racial and ethnic groups.