Naysayers didn't deter Mexican figure skater Donovan Carrillo, the rare Latin American athlete at the Winter Games, who has now become an even more rare Beijing Olympics success story – however relative – from that part of the globe.

Benjamín Villalta, a 39-year-old Nicaraguan, couldn’t believe that a Mexican immigration office would open in the middle of the night to give him and some 40 other migrants humanitarian visas that would allow them to move about Mexico and work.