It’s no surprise that a warming planet is hard on cold-weather sports – on their participants and fans, the businesses they support, and their importance to local cultures. As the 2022 Winter Olympics unfold in China, it will be the first time ever that every single inch of snow under ski or snowboard will be artificial.
It may seem like a long time ago, but for close to seven weeks in the winter of 1964, a hot dry wind blew across the slopes at Innsbruck, Austria, melting the snow ahead of the Winter Olympics, according to Quartz.
However, to save the games, Austrian soldiers hauled 20,000 cubic meters (700,000 cubic feet) of ice blocks and 20,000 cubic meters (1.4 million cubic feet) of snow to the site, packing it onto the slopes by hand.
But since that time, starting with the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, officials have made wide use of snow-making machines. Over the years, amid warming global temperatures, officials have come to increasingly rely on artificial snow, spewed out in tiny balls.
Nearly 80 percent of the snow on the slopes in Sochi, Russia, during the 2014 Olympics was fake. In 2010, Vancouver, Canada turned 7,960 cubic meters (2.1 million gallons) of water into snow. Four years later in PyeongChang, South Korea, the figure amounted to 90 percent.
The Beijing Winter Olympics 2022
The 2022 Winter Olympics almost didn’t happen because no one wanted to sponsor them. Beijing ended up solving that problem, but only after four European cities thought about it and dropped out, mostly because of the expense and lack of public support, reports the Associated Press.
The IOC narrowly chose China’s capital and its mostly bone-dry surrounding mountains over a bid from Kazakhstan. “It really is a safe choice,” IOC President Thomas Bach said after the balloting.
The city of Zhangjiakou, 100 miles (300 kilometers) northwest of Beijing, which will host freestyle skiing, snowboarding, biathlon, ski jumping, and cross-country skiing events, is certainly cold. So is Yanqing, 50 miles northwest of Beijing, which is home to the Alpine skiing venue. This venue alone needs 1.2 million cubic meters of snow.
However, Zhangjiakou and the whole of Beijing are extremely highly water-stressed, according to the China Water Risk assessment. China’s Olympic bid noted it would need an army of snow machines and 49 million gallons of water to get the slopes ready for the winter of 2022.
A geographer interviewed by Bloomberg estimated that the country could divert as much as 2 million cubic meters (528 million gallons) of water to snow-making, further straining the already seriously water-stressed region.
The International Olympic Committee’s 2015 report evaluating China’s bid for the games said they believed Beijing had “underestimated the amount of water that would be needed for snowmaking for the Games” and “overestimated the ability to recapture water used for snowmaking.”
As Digital Journal reported on January 25, rising temperatures caused by the escalating climate crisis mean future Winter Olympics will struggle to find host cities with enough snow and ice, according to a study.
Unless the world can make drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, on the current trajectory, by the 2080s all but one of the 21 cities that previously hosted the Winter Games – Sapporo, Japan – would not be able to do so again.
