I read back to the earlier postings in this thread, which concerned India in more detail. India actually presents a unique situation. Consider this: Know how many individual gold medals India has won in any Olympics, summer or winter?
One.
That's right. One medal, for marksmanship, won in the 2008 Beijing games. India regularly wins team golds for I think field hockey. But no golds for track, for swimming, for competitive walking, for long jump, for dressage, for gymnastics. Fascinating to compare India with the other rising economic giant in Asia, China, in terms of its approach to sports excellence. As several of you have said, becoming a sports power in even one sport generally takes a certain amount of elbow grease, national sponsorship, team building--or a lucky break with one talented and motivated athlete, who generally trains in a galaxy far, far away, as YuNa does.
Even so, I'm partial to the idea that skaters from tiny new federations should be welcome to the feast. As Mathman pointed out, that's how China got started. As far as letting the fourth and fifth skaters from a powerhouse country like Japan come instead of skaters from places like Turkey and Estonia, well, that's the age-old difficulty with sports. There's a lot of pecking order and resulting heartbreak involved. Just ask the Chicago Cubs. I don't know if we'll ever solve that one.