Olympic Athlete Profile (25 of 25)-Kwame Nkrumah-Achepong/skier/Ghana

First of all, we thought this day would never come! A part of me wants to apologize to Scandanavian athletes, since we only featured one in our series, but instead I will simply mention that the Finnish women's cross-country skiing team featuring Pirjo Muranen won bronze during the Olympics on Thursday.

Unlike Finland, the west African nation of Ghana does not see snow, which makes Kwame's story all the more unique. The skier, 35, nicknmaed The Snow Leopard, told the BBC last year that for an African athlete in Vancouver simply proving you belong on the slopes in the most important thing:

"My hope is to ski very well and prove to people that I deserve to be on the hill with other top world athletes."

Kwame, who ironically shares his name with a Kenyan politician, first learned to ski on artificial slopes in the United Kingdom where he has spent much of his adult life. He told the BBC that the sport fits his thrill-seeking personality:

"It's an extreme sport and I've always liked challenges and it was more difficult than the traditional sports I was used to," Kwame said. "I just wanted to see if I could cut the real thing."

Kwame hooked up with Denis Grigorev, a coach from Uzbekistan who he met during a trial competition in Iran.

"My coach told me to avoid any embarrasment," Kwame said. "I should just go straight down, so that's what I did just go straight down."

The skier from Ghana initially tried to compete at the 2006 Olympics in Turin, Italy, but his flight to an Olympic trial was postponed at the Amsterdam airport due to ice on the wings.

Kwame told "The Canadian Press" that he aims to have a blast in Vancouver:

"I just into skiing for fun," Kwame said. "It's just turned into something else now."

As one might expect, Kwame has become a sensation in Vancouver with tourists buying him lunch. Canadian fiddler Ashley Maclsaac actually wrote a charity song entitled "Dreams" to help with the skier's Olympic expenses.

MSNBC reported that Kwame is not interested in becoming a mere novelty athlete, like ski jumper Eddie the Eagle who became a sensation at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary:

"For me, sports are competition," Kwame said. "It's not about all the funny things can do to create loads of money, I think the teams around me understands we are not a joke."

After the Olympics, Kwame wants to open a grass ski slope in Ghana so his countrymen can learn to ski like him.

Kwame is also popular with local stores as Chackas, a gift shop in downtown Vancouver, has dedicated its entire store-front window to "The Snow Leopard."

He is set to ski for the first time at the games this afternoon.

Olympic Athlete Profile (24 of 25)- Muhammad Abbas/skier/Pakistan

We are heading down the proverbial slopes as we get ready to conclude this lengthy series on Olympic athletes competing at the Winter Games in Vancouver.

Today, we profile Muhammad Abbas, 24, an employee of the Pakistani Air Force who is also the first Pakistiani athelete to compete in alpine skiing for his country.

Abbas finished 79th in the competition earlier in the week. The giant slalom event featured 103 skiiers from 60 countries. Abbas finished higher than some other low-ranked skiers, including Dow Travers from The Cayman Islands and Jamyang Namgiel from Pakistan's traditional rival India.

According to the English-language Pakistani news web site dawn.com, Abbas said he was thrilled to be on the same as American skiing sensation Bode Miller and Norwegian great Aksel Lund Svindal (whom we profiled earlier).

Abbas fist skied on the hills of his Himalayan mountain village in wooden skis which his father made for him.

One of the challenges for Pakistani skiers is finding the time and place to train as Abbas' coach Zahid Farooq told dawn.com:

"In the last two years, we have trained only eight weeks," Farooq said. "We had two weeks in Austria in '08, and six weeks in '09."

Farooq also told Reuters that there is only one small slope, which is 500 meters long, in Pakistan.

The Pakistani coach told dawn.com that in addition to arranging training time for Abbas, he also helps him by cooking, cleaning and interpreting for him.

Farroq added that he hopes to have a female skier on the Pakistani Winter Olympics at the 2014 games in Soshi, Russia.

Olympic Athlete Profile- Aksel Lund Svindal/men's slalom/Norway

For those of us watching the Olympics in Vancouver, Norwegian skier Aksel Lund Svindal might be known as the man who beat Bode Miller, but he has a very unique personal story and he is one of his sport's greatest champions.

Lund, 27, lives in Kjeller, Norway. He beat out Miller (silver) and American skier Andrew Weibrecht (bronze) to win gold at the Super G with a time of 1:30.34.

Svindal has won five World Championships and 13 World Cup races. Additionally, he won four medals at the 2002 World Junior Championships.

The Norwegian skier crashed badly during a downhill race at the Beaver Creek ski resort in Avon, Colo., in 2007.

Despite many broken bones and numerous surgeries, Svindal returned to the sport in October of 2008, and ironically won one of his first comeback victories at Beaver Creek.

In Vancouver, Svindal also won a silver medal in downhill skiing, finishing behind Swiss skier Didier Defago, but beating out Miller by 0.02 of a second.

Svindal won his first Olympic gold medal while competing at the Vancouver Olympics.

On his own personal blog, which is in English, Svindal said that it 'has been a great Olympics so far, and it can only get better.'