Athletes gear up for cold war at Winter Olympics
Even for cold weather warriors hardened by years of winter sports training, the icy chill of South Korea’s frigid February has come as a shock to the system in the lead-up to the Pyeongchang Olympics.
Plunging to -20°C at night and rarely breaking above freezing in the day, the temperatures have put Pyeongchang on track to be the coldest Olympics in decades and present athletes with a different set of conditions from the sunshine and slushy snow of Sochi four years ago.
The 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, where temperatures dipped to -11°C, are the coldest Olympics on record but Games in Turin, Vancouver and Sochi have all been significantly warmer.
Sporting and digital equipment appears no match for the biting cold either, with skis warped to such an extent that coaches are tossing them out like “garbage”, while cellphone and TV camera batteries are being rendered lifeless.
Austrian alpine skier Marcel Hirscher said athletes were using a different pair of skis on every run as the frigid temperatures sharpened snow crystals.
“Snow crystals get really sharp when temperatures go to minus 20 degrees and the base burns,” he said.
Health concerns, too, have risen to the fore. Norway’s cross-country team has brought some training indoors to prevent cold air from damaging athletes’ airways, while fears that an outbreak of norovirus would sweep through the Games prompted organisers to keep infected staff away from work.
But it is the threat of hypothermia at Friday’s opening ceremony that has set organisers on edge, with presidents, prime ministers and some 35,000 spectators scheduled to gather at Pyeongchang’s $58m open-air Olympic stadium.
The ceremony has been slimmed down to a brisk twohour march from the typical four-hour procession and organisers plan to dish out hats, blankets and seat-warmers to combat the cold, though that has not been enough to reassure spectators as a number of tickets have already been returned.
Sadie Bjornsen, a crosscountry skier on Team US said they were taking the cold threat seriously. “We’ve got heated jackets from Ralph Lauren and we’ve also been told that there’s going to be a warm area that we can stand in.”
The Korean Meteorological Administration (KMA) may just have provided a ray of sunshine for organisers on Wednesday, however. “According to our forecast the temperature will not be problematic to have the opening ceremony,” KMA deputy director Choi Heung-jin told reporters. Temperatures would range from -2°C to -5°C, which would not be overly concerning, he said.
Yoon Hee-dong, director of the KMA’s forecast bureau, said that spectators coming to Gangwon province should realise that it was colder than other parts of South Korea and that they should “bundle up”.
A hardy construction worker at the media centre in Pyeongchang, layered up with only his eyes and nose exposed to the elements, said the cold was “different” here.
“This is not Seoul,” he said. “This is Pyeongchang cold.”
The cold snap has prompted the Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to issue warnings about cold weather injuries such as hypothermia and frostbite.
Not everyone is praying for spring, with manufacturers and retailers of cold weather equipment enjoying a boon. Sales of hot packs had skyrocketed, creating shortages of materials for manufacturers, Yonhap News said last week.
North Korea has agreed to participate at the Games amid a thaw in relations with the South, and the cold does not seem to be anything out of the ordinary for their delegation.
“I don’t know whether it’s cold, because I’m from North Korea,” said Won Gil-woo, the deputy sports minister who led the North’s delegation to the Games. “Pyeongchang weather is good.”