Cyprus

Cyprus

Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...

(CYP) has sent athletes to every Olympic Games

Olympic Games

The Olympic Games is a major international event featuring summer and winter sports, in which thousands of athletes participate in a variety of competitions. The Olympic Games have come to be regarded as the world’s foremost sports competition where more than 200 nations participate...

 held since 1980, although the country has never won an Olympic medal. They had a near miss at the 2008 Olympics when Antonis Nikolaidis lost the bronze medal shoot-off in men's skeet. The first modern Olympian from Cyprus was actually Anastasios Andreou

Anastasios Andreou

Anastasios Andreou was a Greek athlete from Cyprus. He competed at the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens.He was born in Limassol in 1877. He studied at the Greek School of Limassol where he was declared Multi-victorious Champion....

 in 1896, who competed under the Greek

Greece at the 1896 Summer Olympics

Greece was the host nation of the 1896 Summer Olympics held in Athens. The number of Greek contestants is commonly cited as 169, but as many as 176 Greeks contested events in all nine sports. The Greeks were by far the most successful nation in terms of total medals with 46, 26 more than the...

 flag. At this time, Cyprus was a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 colony

Colony

In politics and history, a colony is a territory under the immediate political control of a state. For colonies in antiquity, city-states would often found their own colonies. Some colonies were historically countries, while others were territories without definite statehood from their inception....

.

Because the so called Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus

Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus

Northern Cyprus or North Cyprus , officially the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus , is a self-declared state that comprises the northeastern part of the island of Cyprus...

 is not internationally recognized

Turkish invasion of Cyprus

The Turkish invasion of Cyprus, launched on 20 July 1974, was a Turkish military invasion in response to a Greek military junta backed coup in Cyprus...

, it has no Olympic committee. Therefore, all Cypriot Olympians compete under the name and flag of the Republic of Cyprus.