‘You can’t count on it anymore’
Climate change hits Winter Olympic preparation
SAAS-FEE, Switzerland — The athletes’ half-hour commute in the Swiss Alps — up two gondolas, then through a tunnel in the world’s highest underground train to a glacier at 11,000 feet — served up daily grim reminders that global warming is threatening their line of work.
After exiting the train, they squelched through a field of greyish mud to reach shrinking snowfields scarred by new crevasses. Occasionally, they heard the sharp roars of glacial ice breaking off in monster chunks, then echoing across the peaks where they trained jumps, tricks and turns for the Pyeongchang Olympics. Most days, they basked in brilliant, snow-melting sunshine that bathed the whole scene in deceptive beauty.
Another subtle but telltale indicator of climate change’s disruptive impact on winter sports: Many athletes — here 8,000 kilometres away from the Rockies and 5,600 km from the Green Mountains of New England — had the letters “USA” emblazoned on their jackets. Americans once had little need to swap continents to guarantee off-season access to snow. But warming is forcing athletes to hunt farther from home for wintry conditions, particularly just months away from an Olympics.
Last year, the aerials team stopped water training at its headquarters in Park City, Utah, in mid-October, then sat and waited a month for snow that came late to the mountain that hosted the winter games 15 years ago. The World Cup season began in China, and the Americans were forced to travel there not having set foot on snow in months. The results, not surprisingly, were dismal: Not a single podium and only one finish in the top 5.
Lesson learned: This season, they uprooted to glaciers at Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and Ruka, Finland, for autumn training needed to be competitive at February’s Winter Games in South Korea.
The hunt for off-season training spots like these is increasingly a scramble, and not just for the Americans. The hellishly named “Lucifer” heat wave that baked Europe in July and August wreaked havoc on teams’ schedules. Canadian skicross racers had to cancel plans to train on Italy’s Stelvio glacier that turned a sickly grey, rerouting to Mount Hood, Ore., instead. Canadians endured issues elsewhere, scrubbing a planned summer training trip to Argentina because of hostile weather and extreme winds.
France’s moguls team cut short a July training camp on its home glacier in Tignes after a crevasse opened under the course, which this year had just one jump instead of the usual two because of a shortage of snow, said team member Ben Cavet.
He was shocked by the visible deterioration of his regular venue for summer training .
“It’s crazy, you know? I always thought global warming was like your granddad going, ‘Oh, I used to go and ski here 20 or 30 years ago and there was more snow,’ ” Cavet said in an interview. “But now we really are talking eight years. I can see a huge difference. Up on the glacier, now there’s this huge cliff, you know like a big rock, that you couldn’t even see before.”
“It is worrying, very worrying,” he added. “What scares me about global warming is that you can see that the world is suffering in some of the most beautiful places on Earth.”
Other glaciers suffered, too:
• Austria’s Moelltaler Glacier closed from Aug. 15-Sept. 7 because of what its operators said were “water gutters in the ice” and other safety concerns.
• The Stubai Glacier, also in Austria, is deteriorating. U.S. coach Mike Jankowski, who brought some of the snowboarders and freeskiers there after the Saas-Fee trip, said there are concerns that some of the big buildings, drilled into the permafrost on the glacier, might not be stable for much longer.
• The Horstman Glacier in Whistler, Alta., near the 2010 Olympic Alpine venue, has deteriorated so badly that a renowned recreational snowboard camp was cancelled, and other activities curtailed.
• Glaciers of the French Alps lost an average of 25 per cent of their surface area between 2003 and 2015, and the rate of shrinkage nearly tripled, according to a study being readied for publication early next year.
French researcher Antoine Rabatel said it is “highly probable” that the same trends will show up at glaciers elsewhere in Europe, as winters get shorter and summers hotter.
Winter sports training, he said, is “going to become harder and harder.”
The quest for reliable spots is becoming more competitive, and securing training locales is increasingly using up coaches’ time and budgets.
In October, skiing and snowboard athletes from the U.S. and dozens of other nations lined up before dawn, doing warmup exercises in the dark as they waited, to squeeze aboard the first gondola up to Saas-Fee’s glacier. It also is in retreat, no longer reaching down to above the no-cars-allowed resort town, as it did in the 1930s.
Environmentally minded athletes are wrestling with the moral dilemma of contributing to atmospheric pollution with their widening search for snow.
“We take planes to go overseas. We take cars every day to go training,” said French snowboard-cross racer Pierre Vaultier, gold medallist at the 2014 Sochi Games. “We are not examples about how to decrease global warming.”
Biathlon venues such as Ruhpolding in Germany and Ostersund, Sweden, commonly now make thousands of cubic yards of snow at the end of winter and store it through summer beneath tarps and wood chips for early-season races the next winter.
“We used to have relatively reliable conditions at all biathlon venues around the world,” said Max Cobb, the president of U.S. Biathlon. “You can’t count on it anymore.”