Olympics 2022 – Changing climate conditions raise concerns about the future of winter sports

Skiers and snowboarders compete at Beijing Winter Olympics Starting this weekend will be the first team to chase their Olympic medals in mountains covered with 100% artificial snow.

Training and competing on artificial snow has become an inevitable reality as warmer temperatures and changing weather patterns make it increasingly difficult to rely on nature. Artificial snow has been used to supplement Olympic venues since the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics and has steadily increased over the past few decades, according to an Olympic snowmaking research report published this week. before.

Jamie Anderson, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in snowboarding and a silver medal in his 2018 Olympic debut in major skiing, who will compete for Team USA in Beijing, said: Natural snow is always better. “Consistency, texture, all.”

With only light shining this season in Yanqing and Zhangjiakou, two venues that will host mountain events in China, the snowmakers at the Olympics will need to supply 49 million gallons of water – enough to fill about 75 Olympic-sized swimming pools — through their machines to generate an estimated 1.2 million cubic meters of snow, diverting significant energy and water resources in an arid region. More broadly, the researchers say about 95 percent of the world’s ski resorts rely on snow guns or water cannons to protect their runs.

Madeleine Orr, a lecturer at Loughborough University in London and founder of The Sport Ecology Group, co-author of the magazine snow making report.

Orr’s team worked on this report in conjunction with Protect Our Winters, an athlete-driven nonprofit that promotes legislation with impact related to climate change. While veteran athletes like Anderson prefer an all-natural field, many are now used to competing on artificial or mixed snow. Their larger concern stems from what changing conditions will mean for their sporting future.

Events at the Beijing Olympics will benefit from an Olympic-sized budget, and temperatures are expected to stay below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Money and warm temperatures limit the extent to which snow-making technology can offsets changing weather patterns in ways that have dramatically disrupted mountain sports for everyone from recreational beginners to the world’s best competitors.

“It affects us as professional racers, but I worry about the future,” said snowboarder Kelly Clark, who won the 2002 gold in the round. competed in the past five Olympics, said.

Clark, a native of Vermont, said the absence of snow and warmer temperatures have made it difficult to find ski resorts with halfpipes, especially on the East Coast, which makes referrals with people about this sport becomes more difficult and expensive.

“Now, athletes go to four or five of the same resorts each season, where cold temperatures and light meals are guaranteed,” says Clark. “It’s a pity for viewers and participants, and that will affect the future of our sport and how exclusive it becomes.”

Molly Mahar, president of Ski Vermont, said snowmaking has allowed ski resorts and their areas to maintain a fairly consistent season over the past decade. She said a larger trend towards warmer temperatures is concerning for the ski industry, but many mountains have disappeared from making the lower half of the tube because of warmer temperatures and more because there is not enough demand. demand from skiers and snowboarders to justify the extra work. needed to build and maintain them.

In a recent survey of 339 elite ski and snowboard athletes and coaches, more than 90% said they felt a responsibility to advocate for climate action to help the sport. their existence in the future. Daniel Scott, a professor of environmental management at the University of Waterloo, who led surveysaid warm temperatures are considered by many to be the sport’s biggest threat both in terms of long-term sustainability and short-term safety.

Survey respondents said the ideal temperature to compete is between -10 and -1 degrees Celsius (14 and 30 degrees Fahrenheit). Most conditions are said to become “unacceptably hot” around 10 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit).

Average February daytime temperatures at former Olympic sites have risen steadily over the past century from 0.4 C (32 F) in 1920-1950 to 6.3 C (43 F) since 2000. Research by Scott projects that, even in a scenario where humans significantly limit greenhouse gas emissions, at least eight of the 21 cities that have hosted the Winter Olympics would no longer a reliable venue for the Olympics for the next 30 years.

Outside of the Olympics, ski resorts have pushed past limits on how much snow they can produce during warmer winters. Scott said the average number of days that resorts are open increased from the 1980s to the first decade of the 2000s as snowmaking capacity expanded. However, that trend reversed in the 2010s as temperatures continued to rise.

“Even with multiple snow generation systems in place, the average ski season in the 2010s eventually stopped growing and actually got a little shorter,” says Scott. “You’re seeing the limit of what that adaptive strategy can do. That’s the physical limit.”

Snow machines use chemical additives to help create snow at temperatures above freezing, but the process can further harm the local environment and use up countless natural resources. It’s also expensive. Orr said snow at the 2022 Olympics will cost about $3 per cubic meter ($3.6 million in total) to make.

According to Chris Castaneda, who builds courses for X Games as event executive at Snow Park Technologies, most of the cost comes from the amount of electricity needed. Courses for the events that require the most snow – like halfpipes and aerial jumps – have become more expensive to create over the past 20 years.

Castaneda and his team use a variety of techniques to prepare for major events: from water cannons, pushing ice through machines similar to large wood chisels, and even sometimes a combination of liquid nitrogen and water inside. temperature controlled giant tents.

“We can make snow,” says Castaneda. “There’s always a solution.” “But what is the price to pay?”

Some of the more complex techniques are not available to conventional ski resorts. Even basic snow machines come with a hefty price tag that ends up being shipped to the customer. Today’s Olympic athletes are worried that the pool for the next generation of athletes in their sports is shrinking and access is increasingly limited for the wealthy.

“The sport is becoming a lot more exclusive,” said 2002 Olympic skier Tricia Byrnes, a native of Connecticut. “It’s the same in Colorado, but more dramatic than on the East Coast. It’s 80 [degrees] one day, it snowed up to 3 meters and then it rained. If we didn’t have artificial snow, we wouldn’t have a ski industry. “

Competitive costs are also becoming a separating factor for even the best-funded athletes and teams at the sport’s elite levels. For example, cross-country skiing gold medalist Kikkan Randall said countries with larger team budgets have a distinct advantage in her sport when artificial snow and warm temperatures combine to create unsuitable terrain. Randall says the well-funded teams will travel with expensive, heavy-duty ski grinders that allow them to carve new patterns into the soles of the skis to match the conditions of the course. The right type of channel carved into the bottom of a snowboard can help athletes move faster by dumping water more efficiently in wet snow conditions.

“A team like Norway brings in 20 soldiers and they can split into teams and test four things at once. Norway has a huge budget; they can send people to the Olympic venue first,” Randall said. four years to test the snow”. “Team USA, we don’t have enough resources to carry [grinding machines]. When waxing conditions are difficult, with large temperature fluctuations, the team with the most resources will have the advantage.”

The need to travel longer distances to find good conditions for downhill skiers and outlying skiers is also a limitation to the number of elite level athletes that can afford to train year-round or prolong their careers by creating revenue-generating films.

2014 Olympic snowboarding champion Sage Kotsenburg said: “I feel like the kids. “For those of us older than us, the blueprint is that you compete in the park and the pipeline, then you ride and film with the powder, and now we start later and try to find powder anywhere and it’s becoming more and more extreme and expensive to follow that blueprint.Things are expensive in skiing these days and that’s not helping the situation. “

Scott and Orr both say celebrity athletes can play an important role in raising awareness about climate change. Scott said he was pleased to see that many of his recent survey respondents were aware of the challenges ahead. Clark and Randall are among many athletes who have lobbied members of Congress for climate action legislation through their work with Protect Our Winter.

“They’re seeing changes,” Scott said. “It’s a message that really takes home for me, over 90% saying they feel a personal responsibility to use their voice to be a champion for climate action. That’s it. It’s a really positive thing to see that athletes are finding their voices.”

Scott said he has had initial conversations with members of the International Olympic Committee about responding to the impact of climate change on the Winter Olympics. Future games may need to span larger areas rather than a specific city, and sports federations may need to create rules about temperature ranges when it’s not safe. to organize competitions.

As well as adjusting to the upcoming changes, the IOC is also trying to mitigate the damage by pushing back its weight in an effort to go green. Starting with the 2024 Olympics in Paris, all host cities will be required to be “climate-positive”, meaning to generate or buy enough carbon to offset any emissions due to event created. The energy-intensive process of generating snow will add to the challenge of achieving that goal for future Winter Olympics venues.