Want a Winter Olympic medal? Pick a very chilly niche.

Countries that win at the Winter Games tend to be wealthy and, for a good chunk of the year, cold. That’s a fairly narrow slice of the world.

Succeeding in the chilly confines of winter sports requires such specialized skills that even a small country can blunt the medal-gobbling capabilities of the superpowers by doing one thing exceptionally well.

We’re looking at you, Norway — but also at three other countries that managed to crowd nearly every competitor off the medal stand.

Norway has a population of 5.5 million — less than the Atlanta metro area — but has won more medals in the past two Winter Olympics than any other nation, thanks largely to cross-country skiing.

If you include biathlon and Nordic combined, which are events with a little shooting and ski jumping mixed in, cross-country skiing accounted for more than two-thirds of Norway’s medals and 81 percent of its golds.

Norway’s love affair with cross-country skiing predates the Olympics by a good five millennia or so. An image of a skier with a pole was carved into Norwegian rock during the Stone Age. Somewhat more recently, cross-country skiing was employed by fighters in the Norwegian military, letter carriers in the postal service and in the famous rescue of a king’s son in 1206 that is commemorated by an annual race.

The sport’s ethos meshes well with the country’s general hardiness and laid-back love of the outdoors.

“Our system is not set up for success,” said biathlete Vetle Sjaastad Christiansen to The Post’s Chuck Culpepper last week after a relay victory. “It’s more a system for joy and happiness, to have joy with your sport and first of all be healthy. And maybe that’s why we are so successful, because we really enjoy what we’re doing and it’s then easy to work hard.”

Germany has been a luge power from the beginning, but this month, it dominated bobsled and skeleton as well. Ten gold medals were up for grabs in the three sliding sports, and Germany won nine of them, along with six silvers and a bronze.

The country has some obvious things going for it in the sliding sports, and all require significant financial investment.

First is home-track advantage. Only 17 World Cup-level sliding tracks exist, and four of them are in Germany. (The United States, by comparison, has two.)

The second is experience, with a well-funded training system and a history of glittering superstars to inspire the next generation.

“In Germany, we have a big luge tradition,” said gold medal winner Johannes Ludwig to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle before the Games. “Kids — they do this sport, and everyone is on fire for this sport. I think this is a very big advantage.”

Then there is technology. The arms race in sliding sports rivals that of Formula One racing, and German sleds — especially bobsleds — are considered to be among the best. When the pandemic kept foreign athletes from the Yanqing track, German bobsledders trained in a simulator created by automaker BMW.

The one sliding event in which Germany didn’t win a medal was the women’s monobob, a new Olympic sport in which all sleds are alike. (Team USA’s Kaillie Humphries and Elana Meyers Taylor won gold and silver.)

The first ice skaters were probably Bronze Age northern Europeans who strapped animal bones to their feet and propelled themselves with sticks for transportation, according to research by sport scientist Federico Formenti. Skating for fun and sport probably emerged on Dutch canals in the 13th century, after the invention of wooden skates with metal blades. Organized races may have been held in the Netherlands as far back as 1676.

That’s a long way of saying the Dutch have history — and possibly even a homegrown patron saint — on their side when it comes to speedskating.

The country has far more speedskating medals than anyone else, with 133. (Norway is second with 87.) And that is despite Dutch skaters not winning their first medals until 1952, 28 years after the sport’s Olympic debut.

In the past three Games, the Netherlands has won more than half of the gold medals in speedskating (21 of 40) — plus four more in short-track — and set four Olympic records in the process.

South Korea doesn’t own short-track speedskating — China and Canada are too competitive for that. But Koreans have led the medal standings since the sport debuted in 1992, and despite injuries, uncharacteristic falls and controversy on and off the ice, the country still won more short-track medals — five, including two gold — than anyone else in Beijing.

Before 1992, South Korea had not won a medal in 10 Winter Games. When short-track was voted onto the program for 1992, the government recognized an opportunity and poured resources into the sport, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Kim Ki-Hoon won the inaugural 1992 short-track gold in world record time and became a national hero. The country has been short-track mad ever since.

In 2018, South Korean President Moon Jae-in rushed across the country from a historic meeting in Seoul with the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to catch the opening night of short-track speedskating in Gangneung. Lim Hyo-jun made the trip worthwhile by winning gold in the men’s 1,500.

As South Koreans settled in for watch parties celebrating this year’s Games, wine sales shot up 38 percent, according to one of the country’s largest retailers. (Cheese, olives and salami also saw a bump.) K-pop megastars, including a member of BTS, tweeted their best wishes to the short-track team. Relay skater Kwak Yoon-gy reciprocated by dancing on the medal stand to the group’s hit “Dynamite.”

It’s tough to stay on top

True domination is hard to achieve, and it is at least as hard to maintain across decades as the Games become more global.

Russian skaters once owned the pairs event in figure skating, winning gold at every Olympics between 1964 and 2006. No judge even voted in favor of a non-Russian pair between 1964 and 1998, according to Olympic historian David Wallechinsky in “The Complete Book of the Winter Olympics.”

But economic hardship resulting from the Soviet Union’s collapse disrupted the country’s youth program in the 1990s, as the New York Times reported, and while Russian pairs are still extremely good, they are no longer invincible. None won a medal in 2010 or 2018, and since 2014, the entire Russian athletic program has been mired in a state-sponsored doping scandal. In Beijing, transcendent performances from the Chinese team of Sui Wenjing and Han Cong kept the Russians from winning gold and sweeping the pairs medals.

Austrian skiers have won far more medals than anyone else in the history of the Alpine events, 128 (40 gold) compared to Switzerland with 75 (27 gold), yet the Swiss topped Austria this month (9-7, and five golds to three).

Four years from now, ski mountaineering will be introduced at the Milan Cortina Winter Games. The sport, popular in Italy, involves hiking up mountains and skiing down. “Skimo” will feature medals in five events — perhaps an opportunity for yet another country to dominate.