Austrian lockdown covers schools and stores, but not ski slopes

Most of their European neighbors can only dream of snow-covered slopes while they endure holiday lockdowns, but Austrians are jamming ski-resort parking lots and lift lines, defying social-distancing rules as they take to the runs of their alpine country.

Austrians’ relationship to skiing is deeply emotional. For many it is a birthright and national pastime. So despite a third national lockdown that took effect Saturday, the country decided that ski resorts could remain open, but only for residents of Austria.

Skiers are required to wear medical-grade masks while in line for and riding on the lifts and gondolas, but calls for social distancing have been futile. The ski season that began the day before Christmas has led to traffic jams and long, crowded lift lines, prompting the police to issue warnings for people to stay home and local authorities to call on Monday for security reinforcements at some resorts.

But to some skiers, the experience of spending a sunny afternoon on the slopes of the Alps — in the midst of a lockdown, after months of life in the coronavirus pandemic — felt like an illicit pleasure.

“I know that it is complete insanity to close everything except the ski hills in a lockdown,” said Fabian Hasler, a 20-yearold student who is from Graz and has been skiing since childhood and spent Sunday at the Tauplitz resort in Styria, east of Salzburg. “But as a passionate skier, for me this bit of normalcy was like a shot of heroin.”

Yet videos of skiers jammed together while waiting for lifts, packed between cars in parking lots and making their way up to the lift lines drew criticism among Austria’s European Union neighbors, whose ski hills remained closed. It also raised eyebrows among Austrians who questioned the importance that their leaders place on the right to speed down a snowy mountainside.

“Since yesterday and until Jan. 18, we are not allowed to visit the grandparents,” Armin Wolf, who anchors the main evening news broadcast of Austria’s ORF public television, wrote on Twitter, along with a picture of people packed tightly together in line at a ski resort over the weekend.