For a country of two million people, the tally of Olympic medals is far from modest - eight golds, ten silvers and 17 bronze medals in individual events, as well as two golds, six silvers and four bronzes in team sports.
The first Slovenian Olympian was Rudolf Cvetko (1880-1977), an officer in the Austrian army, who won silver in fencing at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics for the Austrian team. The next games were called off due to WWI and Slovenia was already in another country by the time of the following games.
The first athlete to compete for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was football player Stanko Tavcar (1898-1945) in 1920, yet it took until the Paris games of 1924 for Slovenian athletes to ascend among the stars. The legendary gymnast Leon Stukelj (1898-1999) won two golds there - all-around and horizontal bar.
Four years later in Amsterdam, Stukelj won the rings event and two all-round bronzes, team and individually, to which Joze Primozic (1900-1985) added a silver on the parallel bars and Stane Derganc (1893-1981) another bronze in the vault.
At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Stukelj added another gold to his already impressive tally.
Slovenia had to wait for the next medal until 1964, and this one was in gymnastics as well. Miro Cerar swept the competition in Tokyo and won gold on the pommel horse, adding a bronze on the horizontal bar. Cerar repeated his pommel horse success four years later.
The next medal did not come before 1988, when the double scull of Sadik Mujkic and Bojan Preseren won bronze, heralding the era of rowing that continues to this day; the rowing craze peaked in Sydney in 2000, when Iztok Cop and Luka Spik won the first ever Olympic gold for the independent Slovenia.
For a long time, gymnastics and rowing were the only sports where Slovenians won medals, except in team sports in the time of former Yugoslavia. It was not until 1996 in Atlanta that track athlete Brigita Bukovec and kayaker Andraz Vehovar put their sports on the Slovenian Olympic map.
Slovenia won independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and appeared, thanks to the great understanding shown by the International Olympic Committee, already at the 1992 Winter Olympic Games in Albertville, where 24 Slovenian athletes competed.
The same year, at the summer Olympics in Barcelona, the athletes started winning medals. The then up-and-coming Iztok Cop and Denis Zvegelj won the first medal for the independent country, a bronze in double sculls, while their success was augmented by another bronze won a day later by the coxless four.
In Sydney in 2000 rowers Iztok Cop and Luka Spik won the first ever gold for the independent country in double sculls, and only three hours later shooter Rajmond Debevec won gold in rifle three-position.
The most successful games for Slovenia so far were in Beijing in 2008, where hammer thrower Primoz Kozmus won gold. Swimmer Sara Isakovic and sailor Vasilij Zbogar added silver while shooter Rajmond Debevec and judoka Lucija Polavder won bronze.
Slovenia also has a rich tradition of successful performances at the winter Olympics, although the first medal did not come until 1984, when Jure Franko won giant slalom silver on what was then home turf in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The 1988 winter Olympics in Calgary showed the whole strength of Slovenian athletes: Mateja Svet was only beaten by legendary Swiss skier Vreni Schneider in slalom, while the ski-jumps team came second only to the Finns, led by the unbeatable Matti Nykaenen.
After the successes of Calgary, Slovenia expected a lot from the Albertville games, but the first independent winter Olympics medal had to wait until 1994 in Norway's Lillehammer, when a new generation of young skiers were asserting their dominance.
In Norway, Alenka Dovzan finished third in the Alpine combination while Katja Koren won bronze in slalom. In the men's slalom, Jure Kosir beat fellow countryman Mitja Kunc by a mere nine hundredths to take the bronze.
Since then the winter games have not been as successful for Slovenia. There were no medals in 1998 in Nagano, the 2002 games in Salt Lake City brought one bronze, for the ski-jumps team, and the team left Turin in 2006 empty-handed.