The Olympic Games is a massive event so you would think that it would be impossible for a country that had competitors actually being able to miss it. However, that has actually happened in the past, but it turns out that there was a perfectly logical reason.
In 1908, the Olympics were taking place in London, and even though it was not at the same heights as the games are at this point, they were still going to be pretty impressive. The team from Russia fancied itself as being worthy of winning a few medals, but it turns out that the entire team turned up a staggering 12 days late for the games.
However, the reason why they turned up late was due to a very simple error that nobody had thought about correcting. The issue was that the Russian team was still living according to the Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian calendar that was being used elsewhere. The discrepancy between the two led to them missing the games as they just simply lost track of time and their chances of winning medals were gone.