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There are only a few places in the world that have the right combination of geography and natural climate to host the Olympic Winter Games. As global temperatures rise due the burning fossil fuels, this list is becoming smaller. Factoring in the specific conditions that world-class skiers and snowboarders need to safely land tricks and have fair downhill races means very few past host cities will be able to reliably hold the games again by century’s end, a new study finds.
Each time the Olympics are held, concerns about how climate change will impact the largest of all sporting events have been growing. The Olympic Summer Games has raised concerns about the impact of heat waves on athletes. But the Summer Olympics are more adaptable than their winter counterpart because the former can be held in a much wider range of places and can be pushed into the somewhat cooler “shoulder season.” Refrigeration technology has also helped make it easier to hold some winter events, such as skating and bobsledding, in a wider range of places (even Miami has an ice hockey team). Outdoor sports like skiing and snowboarding are more dependent on the weather.
Previous studies have examined how global warming will affect the snowfall and temperature profiles of Winter Olympic sites—but they have not included the more specific needs of competitive athletes, says the new study’s co-author Daniel Scott, a climate scientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. To find out what conditions were unsafe or unfair for their sport, Scott and his team conducted an anonymous survey online of 339 elite skiers and snowboarders from 20 countries. Generally, the preferred conditions were those with harder snow surfaces, no rain and temperatures between –20 and 10 degrees Celsius.
Warmer temperatures and rain can lead to slushy snow that Scott describes as “like skiing into a pile of sand.” Athletes dealt with such conditions during the 2014 games in Sochi, Russia. Simi Hamilton, a retired crosscountry skier who competed in the Winter Olympics 2010, 2014, and 2018, said that temperatures could reach 15 degrees Celsius on certain days. The snow would be “rock hard and fast in the morning, and then gradually it just became so slow throughout the day,” says Hamilton, who was not involved in the new study. “And it absolutely made for unfair races in some circumstances.”
Artificial snowmaking is also dependent on sufficient cold temperatures. This has been done in the Olympics since the 1980 Games in Lake Placid, N.Y. Almost all of the snow at the Beijing games this year has been human-made because it is now the region’s dry season. “Part of the question of the viability of places to hold the Winter Olympics in the future is not necessarily whether they have the conditions where snow will naturally fall but whether they have conditions to allow for some of the artificial snowmaking,” Scott says.
He and his coauthors analysed the survey results to create four indicators that contribute unfair and dangerous conditions: insufficient snow cover, wet snow, rain and high or low temperatures. These indicators were combined with data from local weather stations and computer models to assess the viability of 21 host cities (going back as far as Chamonix, France in 1924, which hosted the first Winter Games). The team rated a location “reliable” if it had all four indicators during fewer than 25 percent of the days in February. A site was labeled “marginal” if one or more of the indicators occurred between 25 and 49 percent of the time. And it was considered “unreliable” if one or more of them occurred more than 50 percent of the time.
Four host locations—Chamonix, Sochi, the resort now called Palisades Tahoe in Olympic Valley, Calif., and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany—are already unreliable according to the study’s standards, largely because of higher temperatures and wet snow conditions. The study concluded that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow at the same rate as they have over the past two decades, only four locations—Lake Placid, Sapporo, Japan, and the Norwegian cities of Lillehammer and Oslo—will be reliable by mid-century. Only Sapporo will be left in that reliable category by the end the century. If countries can rein in emissions in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement, the researchers found, nine locations will still be a reliable venue by mid-century, and eight will remain so by century’s end. “So that’s the good news: that the outcome is really still in our control,” Scott says.
The study published last month in detail the nuances of the conditions. Current Tourism IssuesThomas Painter, a climate scientist studying snowpack at the University of California Los Angeles, says that these tools are a welcome addition in research in this field. “I really appreciated the perspective of this paper: that they looked beyond the simple binary of ‘Can you have the Olympics or not?’” says Painter, who was not involved with the study. Painter says that the same issues that threaten long-term success of the Winter Games also threaten many communities’ water resources. Many depend on a strong snowpack that can last well into the warm months and replenish rivers and reservoirs as it melts.
The study’s findings mesh with “personal experience witnessing firsthand much warmer winters throughout my whole career” and underline the speed at which those changes are happening, Hamilton says. A decade ago “I think [professional skiers]We all assumed that this was a problem that would eventually affect us, and it took a while for us to figure it out. The sense of urgency just wasn’t really there. Now I feel like things are just happening so fast, and that’s especially scary to see.”
