Question: In which year did this major international sporting event, held once every four years, and for which Cameroon competed for the first time in 2002 at Salt Lake City, begin?

The Olympic Winter Games (official name) (French: "Jeux olympiques d'hiver" ) is a major international sporting event held once every four years, for sports practised on snow and ice.  The first Winter Olympics, the 1924 Winter Olympics, was held in Chamonix, France.  The original five sports (broken into nine disciplines) were bobsleigh, curling, ice hockey, Nordic skiing (consisting of the disciplines military patrol, cross-country skiing, Nordic combined, and ski jumping), and skating (consisting of the disciplines figure skating and speed skating).  The Games were held every four years from 1924 to 1936, interrupted in 1940 and 1944 by World War II, and resumed in 1948.  Until 1992 the Winter and Summer Olympic Games were held in the same years, but in accordance with a 1986 decision by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to place the Summer and Winter Games on separate four-year cycles in alternating even-numbered years, the next Winter Olympics after 1992 was in 1994. <SEP>  The country sent only one representative. Cameroon competed in the Winter Olympic Games for the first time (as of 2014, only time) at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, United States. <SEP> Four cities made the shortlist with their bids to host the 2002 Winter Olympics (formally known as "XIX Olympic Winter Games"), which were awarded to Salt Lake City, on June 16, 1995.  The other cities shortlisted by the IOC Selection Committee chaired by Thomas Bach were Sion, Östersund and Quebec City.  The host city selection procedure to for the 2002 Winter Olympics will go down in history as one of the most controversial, in light of the scandal regarding the interactions between the Salt Lake City bid team and International Olympic Committee (IOC) members; ten IOC members resigned as a result, as did Salt Lake City bid leaders Tom Welch and Dave Johnson.  Nevertheless, Salt Lake City overwhelmingly won the right to host the Games, needing only one round to gain the absolute majority of the votes. <SEP> Originally, the Salt Lake Valley was inhabited by the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute and Ute Native American tribes.  At the time of the founding of Salt Lake City the valley was within the territory of the Northwestern Shoshone, who had their seasonal camps along streams within the valley and in adjacent valleys.  One of the local Shoshone tribes, the Western Goshute tribe, referred to the Great Salt Lake as "Pi'a-pa", meaning "big water", or "Ti'tsa-pa", meaning "bad water".  The land was treated by the United States as public domain; no aboriginal title by the Northwestern Shoshone was ever recognized by the United States or extinguished by treaty with the United States.  Father Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, a Spanish Franciscan missionary is considered the first European explorer in the area in 1776, but only came as far north as Utah valley (Provo), some 60 miles south of the Salt Lake City area.  The first US visitor to see the Salt Lake area was John Chugg in 1824.  U.S. Army officer John C. Frémont surveyed the Great Salt Lake and the Salt Lake Valley in 1843 and 1845.  The Donner Party, a group of ill-fated pioneers, traveled through the Great Salt Lake Valley a year before the Mormon pioneers.  This group had spent weeks traversing difficult terrain and brush, cutting a road through the Wasatch Mountains, coming through Emigration canyon into the Salt Lake Valley on August 12, 1846.  This same path would be used by the vanguard company of Mormon pioneers, and for many years after that by those following them to Salt Lake.