It's Not Just Jamaica With A 'cool Runnings' Story. There Are Sliders From All Over The World Now

It doesn't snow in Jamaica. Or Malta. Or Ghana. There's been a maybe dusting reported on rare occasions in parts of Thailand and Malaysia. And nobody thinks of Spain, Colombia, Israel, Brazil and Taiwan as winter sports superpowers.

They're all sliding anyway.

Those 10 nations - with a combined five Winter Olympic medals between them over the years, all won by Spain - were part of a record turnout of 38 nations over the last two weeks at the world bobsled and skeleton championships in Lake Placid , a sign that the sports are still growing. It's expected that some of the athletes from those nations, even without a sliding track in their homelands and not within thousands of miles of those countries in some cases, will compete at the Olympics next winter .

"I'm really happy that more nations are here, and this sport is growing," said Adanna Johnson, a 17-year-old women's bobsled pilot from Jamaica after she finished the monobob race in Lake Placid last week. "I think one of the reasons is for the Olympics, they only allow for three sleds from the bigger nations to compete and that kind of allows smaller nations to get bumped up in the rankings."

True, there are spots set aside at the Olympics for nations that are developing teams to compete on the sport's biggest stage. That's why there have been sliders from American Samoa, Bermuda, Greece, India, Ireland, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Tonga and the Virgin Islands in the games over the years.