“After that, we really had the proof: It’s really healthy and not only a marketing gag,” said Holger Eichele, the chief executive of the German Brewers Association. From 2011 to 2016, German consumption of nonalcoholic beer grew 43 percent even as overall beer consumption declined, according to Euromonitor International. New brewing techniques helped to diversify and improve the flavor, and now there are more than 400 nonalcoholic beers on the market in Germany. Germans drink more nonalcoholic beer than any nation, except Iran.

“It tastes good, and it’s good for the body,” Linus Strasser, an Alpine skier from Munich, said on Sunday after finishing his second run in the men’s giant slalom. “Alcohol-free wheat beer, for example, is extremely healthy. It’s isotonic. That’s why it’s good for us sports guys.”

Many breweries market their nonalcoholic beers explicitly as sports drinks. The Bavarian brewery Erdinger, for instance, calls its nonalcoholic wheat beer “the isotonic thirst quencher for athletes” and advertises it with the motto, “100% Performance. 100% Regeneration.” Heineken promotes its nonalcoholic beer Heineken 0.0 with lines like, “There is no limit to what the human body can achieve,” and recently struck a deal to sell Heineken 0.0 in the vending machines at McFit Fitness, Germany’s largest chain of gyms. At most major German marathons, nonalcoholic beer is available to runners at the finish line. Erdinger handed out 30,000 bottles at the Berlin Marathon last year.

Sales have been helped by the fact that traditional sports beverages, like Gatorade, are not particularly popular in Germany. Nonalcoholic beer has a lower sugar content compared with many sports drinks, and Germans drank three times as much nonalcoholic beer as they did sports drinks in 2016.

Moritz Geisreiter, a German speedskater, said he drank nonalcoholic beer from the grocery store before switching to a specialized sports beverage designed by a nutritionist. “It’s a nice solution for someone who doesn’t want to pay dozens of euros a week for a nutrition drink,” he said last week at the Olympic skating oval in Gangneung, South Korea.