Ahh the Winter Olympics... Home to some of the most graceful sports like figure skating and skiing. With all the snow involved, it is hard to imagine athletes from countries with little to no snow participating. 

While it can be unexpected, 2 local athletes, Jeffrey Webb and Aruwin Salehhuddin will be participating in the Winter Olympics in the alpine skiing events this year. 

However, in case you didn't know, they aren't the first local athletes to join the Winter Olympics. This is actually the second time Malaysian athletes have managed to qualify for the Winter Olympics. 

Back in the 2018 Pyeongchang Games in South Korea, Jeffrey made his first Olympics debut with Julian Yee. Figure skater Julian, 24, finished 25th in the men's singles while Jeffrey ended 68th in the men's giant slalom and didn't finish in the men's slalom.

While it all seems very exciting, as a person who loves watching winter sports, I always assumed that tropical countries wouldn't be able to join any of the winter games because we don't have snow. Where would the athletes train? 

Do they have a secret snowy mountain that we don't know of? 

Well according to Julian Yee, who loved figure skating because it was sort of an escape from the hot Malaysian weather, his biggest challenge was in fact, finding a place to train!

He used to train at malls with small ice rinks at first. Then, at age 12, he was sent to a figure skating camp in South Korea. 

To train for international competitions, the ice rink at the mall certainly wasn't enough so he had to move to Canada so that he could train properly. 

Julian had to miss the Winter Games this year after the Covid-19 pandemic halted the Canada-based skaters preparations and caused him to miss a lot of qualifying tournaments

As for Jeffrey Webb and Aruwin Salehhuddin, they are both Malaysian athletes who are based in America. Jeffrey went through his training at the US while Aruwin shifted her training stint to Croatia.

Watch Aruwin in action in this video:

So there you have it, Malaysia's Winter Olympics athletes don't have a secret snowy place in the country designed specially for their training, although that would be seriously awesome!