Take a quick look down this list. These are the 30 countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The OECD, the rich nations’ club, based in a château in Paris’s swanky 16th arrondissement.

Now take a look at the medals table from Vancouver (an event under the aegis of a body based in a château in well-to-do Lausanne).

What do you notice? An awful lot of overlap, isn’t there?

If I can translate this similarity into numbers, as I write this after completion of 44 events - ie about halfway through the 2010 Games - athletes from a total of 26 countries have won medals; of these, 16 nations can boast gold medallists.

Of those 26 medalling nations, 18 – close to 70 percent – are OECD members; as are all but two of the 16 with a gold medallist in their population.

It is actually oversimplistic to typecast the OECD as a ‘rich nations’ club’.

As its website makes clear, the body “brings together the governments of countries committed to democracy and the market economy”.

This rules out China and most of the oil-rich Middle East, while the countries of the former Soviet Union have only really been able to aspire to membership in recent times.

Other than those, the vast majority of the wealthiest traditional-style industrialised economies are in there.

In fact, the OECD three years ago agreed to invite five countries, including Estonia, Russia and Slovenia, to open discussions for membership, while offering something called “enhanced engagement” to China.

Factor those into our little calculation and we account for 22 of the 26 Winter Games medal-winning nations, including all 16 of those with one or more 2010 Olympic champions.

What is my point here? To illustrate the extent to which the Winter Olympics – far more than the Summer Games - is the preserve of the privileged few.

Vast expanses of the globe – South America, Africa, India and southern Asia – are so far off the pace as to be, to all intents and purposes, excluded.

And no I don’t think you can put it down simply to a lack of snow and ice.

Last time I checked, athletes from Nepal, or for that matter Chile (the newly-minted 31st  OECD member) have yet to become regular recipients of Winter Olympic medals.

Yet shortage of snow should not be an issue for them. 

You can also argue that elite-level winter sports are the preserve of the relatively well-off even within some of the lucky few countries who can aspire realistically to Olympic silverware.

Take my own country of Great Britain.

A recent conversation with Oliver Jones, formerly chairman of Snowsport GB, the skiing and snowboarding governing body now in administration, revealed that aspiring skiing champions have historically had to pay a portion of their costs.

According to Jones, so-called ‘development squad skiers’ - those on the first rung of the ladder that can take talented youngsters to the Olympic podium - have historically been asked to pay about £10,000 a season towards their overall costs.

It is only a small part of the total - and it is a figure that generally comes down the higher up the rankings they climb - but it strikes me that it must seem an awful lot to a kid from a housing estate.

Says Jones: "Skiing is unfortunately a relatively elitist sport - it isn’t accessible to all.

"And given the pressure on corporate sponsorship and public-sector contributions, it is only going to get worse in the next few years.

"From cheap flights to construction of new winter sports facilities in the UK, huge strides have been taken to allow more and more people to get involved in recreational skiing.

"However, anyone wanting to become a ski racer needs to recognise that, on the journey to the World Cup and the Olympics, they will probably need to fund themselves more than ever before."

Does any of this matter very much, other than to budding British skiers?

Well, if it ever wants to develop the Winter Games into a truly inclusive global event on the scale of the Summer Olympics or football’s World Cup, then it ought to matter to the International Olympic Committee.

For now, what we have in Vancouver is essentially the prosperous at play.

• Would golf have got into the Olympics if Tiger Woods had pranged his car a few months earlier?

My guess is no; its passage onto the list of sports to be played at the 2016 Games was less clear-cut than rugby’s, in spite of a video message to IOC members from its then untarnished star.

If they have done nothing else, Woods’s recent travails have underlined the risks run by any enterprise whose fortunes are tied to the fate of one individual.

The received wisdom is that his sport needs Woods back on the fairway as soon as possible.

I think a better scenario for golf’s long-term health would be if he sat out the season, giving others an opportunity to clamber out of his shadow, and THEN came back to mount his assault on Nicklaus’s record.

David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering last year's Beijing Olympics. An archive of Owen’s material may be found by Twitter users at www.twitter.com/dodo938