So picture this. You are watching the Winter Olympics. It’s prime time. The slope looks perfect, and the camera pans to a mountain that feels like it’s existed forever. Then your brain does the annoying thing brains do now, You start to notice the snow looks a little too uniform.
Too bright, too manufactured. And you start wondering, well, are we still watching winter sports? Or are we watching the world’s most expensive weather workaround? Hey there. Welcome back to the resilience report building cities risk.
I know we’re all hyped up for the Winter Olympics just starting. Lots of excitement today. But have considered how the Olympics are changing? Hi. I’m Aaron, and welcome to this episode of The Report.
So today, how climate change is already rewriting the Winter Olympics and what the IOC and host cities are doing about it, what those fixed costs and money in water and energy and what the gains might look like when a reliable winter has become an extreme luxury product. So let’s start with the obvious problem that somehow still surprises people every four years. Winter sports require cold, real cold. Most snow events need temperatures low enough to keep natural snow from turning to slush. And for a lot of venues, the real issue is it is not cold enough often enough when the schedule demands it. That’s why right now the International Olympic Committee is openly talking about moving future Winter Olympics earlier, but potentially shifting from February into January to get colder conditions and better odds of natural snow.
Reuters reported this idea on February fourth twenty twenty six and the AP reported the same day that IOC is considering earlier dates for both the Olympics and Paralympics partly because March conditions are getting riskier for the Paralympics. That single scheduling conversation tells you a real story here. The IOC is not debating this because somebody likes January better. No. No.
They are debating it because the calendar no longer matches the climate. Now zoom out a bit. Climate research, that looks specifically at Olympic suitable winter conditions is getting more detailed. One major peer review study in twenty twenty four examined climate reliability across ninety three locations that have the infrastructure to host Olympic and Paralympic winter games, snow sports. It finds that the pool of climate reliable venues shrinks substantially as warming continues, especially later in the century.
Separate reporting, built around that same research, has been landing hard in the mainstream press. Bloomberg’s February twenty twenty six reporting, summarized the takeaway in plain English, a meaningful chunk of those ninety three potential host locations, are projected to have unreliable snow conditions around mid century. So what does unreliable mean in real life? Well, it means more years where a host city can still run the games but only by leaning heavily on adaptation measures. Snowmaking, snow storage, moving events to higher elevations, shifting course design, and
Sometimes shifting entire venues. And that gets us to the second act of this story. The Olympics have become a snowmaking Olympics. Beijing twenty two was a turning point because it was widely described as the first Winter Olympics to rely on artificial snow for essentially all competition snow. The IOC published an explainer about artificial snow at Beijing twenty twenty two and the broader climate issue.
Independent academic and the university commentary around Beijing also highlighted the scale of water and energy involved in manufacturing winter conditions at Olympic levels. So let’s bring it forward now to Milano Cortina twenty twenty six. Reporting in early twenty twenty six, describes major upgrades to snowmaking infrastructure, including reservoirs, and controls meant to reduce water and energy use and to optimize when snow is produced. Bloomberg’s climate focused reporting gets specific about the engineering logic. Store water at higher altitude, lean on gravity rather than pumps, it’s possible, and use automation and weather stations to time production efficiently.
AP reporting also framed manufacturers’ snow as a central feature of Milano Cortina’s operational plan. Including new reservoirs and modern snow guns. The story here gets complicated because snowmaking is both a solution and a symptom. On the one hand, it is adaptation. It keeps athletes safer.
It keeps courses fairer. And schedules more predictable. No one wants the Olympics decided by a random rain on a downhill course. On the other hand, snowmaking is a resource gamble. You’re substituting weather uncertainty with infrastructure uncertainty.
That means more water management, more energy planning, more cost, more engineering, and perhaps even more pressure on the landscapes that were already strained. So here’s the question that matters. Does snowmaking solve the climate problem for the Winter Olympics? Well, it solves the immediate broadcasting problem. Does not solve the underlying weather physics.
So let’s explore these trade offs. First, temperature limits. Snowmaking is not magic. It needs cold air, typically below freezing, it becomes less efficient as temperatures rise. If your winter is hovering around the edge of freezing, snowmaking becomes more costly, less reliable, and that’s right when you need it the most.
Second, water. Snowmaking demands huge water volumes. That water is not destroyed It is removed from one time and place and put into another. In a warming world where water competition is increasing, this may, in the future, actually matter more and more. Third is energy.
You can run snowmaking with cleaner electricity and organizers increasingly claim that they will. But the demand curve is still real. If the grid is fossil heavy at the time snow is made, the fix can push emissions in the wrong direction. AP’s climate coverage has been explicit about the energy water bind of snowmaking Even when the organizers point to renewable electricity procurement. And fourth, ecological footprint.
Building reservoirs, moving water, expanding piping networks, reshaping slopes, and hardening venues can leave lasting impacts on the landscape. Olympics are temporary. The infrastructure is not. So adaptation buys time, and It also raises the bar for what country can host, which leads to the next shift climate change is for fewer hosts.
Historically, the Winter Olympics traveled and that was part of the romance. Different mountains, different cultures, different interpretations of winter. But as reliable winter retreats, the host map tightens around colder, higher,. Better resourced locations. That’s exactly what the ninety three location research is getting at.
And why big outlets are now treating host scarcity as an Olympic business risk, and it changes the politics. If only a smaller set of wealthy regions can host, then the Winter Olympics began to resemble a permanent circuit, even if the IOC does not call it that, more repeat hosts. More reliance on existing infrastructure, less appetite for building new venues in marginal climates. From an environmental standpoint, actually, repeat hosts can be good. Reuse beats new construction every time.
The IOC’s sustainability framework pushes organizers toward measuring and reducing carbon footprint and improving event sustainability practices. From a cultural standpoint, it is probably a loss. Less variety, less global representation, less winter belongs to everyone. Now layer in the athlete perspective. Athletes train for consistency.
Winter is becoming less consistent. AP reporting in late twenty twenty five described how athletes are adjusting training as winters shorten and snow becomes less dependable and how that uncertainty reaches into safety preparation, and whether certain sports can remain accessible. So this is not just about the Olympics as a two week event. It’s about the feeder system, local ski hills, ice rinks, youth programs, regional competitions. If the sport becomes more expensive because natural snow is unreliable, and you need snowmaking to keep a season alive, then the athlete pipeline narrows.
And the Olympics becomes less about the best in the world and more about the best who could afford the pathway. The Winter Olympics are not going to vanish tomorrow. The near term future is more like higher elevations, more snowmaking, more scheduled contingency planning, and more political fights over water and cost and the more pressure to keep venues TV ready. You can see the IOC already thinking of the first steps to solve this in operational terms. Move dates earlier, protect the Paralympics from late season warmth, and keep host selection focused on climate secure venues through mid century.
That theme appears explicitly in the climate resilience report circulated through the Protect Our Winters, which notes that the IOC has selected hosts who snow sport venues are assessed as climate reliable under all climate scenarios until mid century. So near term, adaptation, careful host selection, But midterm, the host pool will shrink and the games become more geographically concentrated. So the long term. If emission trajectories stay high, you get a world where natural Winter Olympics becomes a rare thing and the brand has to decide what it even means to celebrate winter. This is where I wanna talk about the weird emotional core of the whole issue.
The Winter Olympics are not just sport. They are a seasonal ritual. They are one of the last mainstream cultural products that still assumes winter is stable. Snow, ice, cold air, Mountain weather is a backdrop you can count on. So climate change breaks that assumption.
The Olympics become a broadcast of our improvisation. What could the IOC do beyond snowmaking and day shifting? Well, one path is the permanent hub model. Pick out a small set of reliable regions, rotate within them, and build long term infrastructure that is reused, less waste, less reinvention, fewer new scars on mountains. Another path is aggressive decarbonization requirements.
Baked into host contracts with independent verification. That would force the games to align with climate goals rather than simply coping with climate impact. the third path is sport program changes. Which is already being discussed in the same breath as scheduling. Reuters noted that IOC is even exploring adding certain summer sports into the Winter Olympics to drive viewership and revenue.
While also reviewing the program more broadly. That idea is controversial for obvious reasons, but it signals something important. The IOC is looking at climate constraints and thinking, We may need to redesign the product. And that brings us to the final question I think is worth leaving hanging.
If the Winter Olympics depends on industrial scale snowmaking, and the number of viable hosts keeps shrinking, what exactly are we celebrating? You can answer that in two ways. A cynical answer and not entirely true. We are celebrating our ability to spend money to simulate a season. The hopeful answer, we are celebrating human skill on the edge of a changing planet.
While using the biggest microphone in winter sports to push faster climate action. The Olympics can be either. The current trajectory looks like a mix. Serious adaptation, real
…Sustainability,
claims, and plenty of PR gloss. When you watch the next Winter Olympics, watch the sidelines as much of the medals.
Pay attention to whether events are moved, delayed, or relocated. Notice how often artificial snow is mentioned as a routine.…Notice whether organizers talk about water and energy sourcing. Because the Winter Olympics are no longer just a sports story. They are a climate system story now told in real time with a global audience.
If you enjoyed this episode, share with somebody who still thinks climate change is only about polar bears. Winter sports are the canary in the snowbank.