Putin’s balmy idea pays off with lots of snow
There’s so much white stuff near Sochi that the avalanches are now a concern
President Vladimir Putin’s huge personal gamble that there would be snow for the first subtropical Winter Olympics next February looks like it may pay off.
Against many expectations, the mountains situated about 45 minutes by car above the palm treeline Black Sea beach resort of Sochi — where the “ice events” such as hockey, figure skating and speedskating are to be held — are a dazzling blizzard of white right now.
It has snowed heavily in and near Krasnaya Polyana several times since the first blizzard of the season on Nov. 28 dumped 20 centimetres of snow, suddenly transforming the sometimes balmy southern Caucasus into a winter wonderland as pretty a jewel as any mountain range in the Alps or the Rockies.
The snow drifts accumulating above Sochi are answering critics who loudly wondered why, in Russia, of all places, Putin strongly pushed for the Games to be held at the southern tip of the country, where even bamboo grows, and were not awarded to a place in Siberia or the northern Urals, where it would be impossible to imagine a shortage of snow.
“A lot of Russians are unhappy because they wanted our first Winter Games to be held in Siberia or the Urals, not in a place such as this with no history of winter sports,” said Yuri Novikov of Sovietsky Sport, who is the only Moscow sportswriter permanently based in Sochi.
“Sochi is a southern resort with a beach mentality. There is no hockey team based here, nor are any of our hockey players or skiers from here. But there are plenty of cyclists and badminton players.”
It is still highly unlikely there will be any snow in the coastal city of Sochi during the XXII Winter Games, but if the competitions were to open today there would be ample snow in the mountains for the alpine, snowboarding and cross-country events as well as providing the kind of gorgeous backdrop for the bobsled and ski jumping venues that television producers will love.
In fact, there is already so much snow on Krasnaya Polyana and neighbouring mountains that work crews are manning an armada of snow plows and snow blowers to keep roads and paths open and have been agitating from underneath immense plastic sheets that ingeniously and almost instantly clear immense piles of snow from stands where spectators and a worldwide television audi- ence in the billions will watch medal presentations.
The southern Caucasus have several mountain ranges that reach more than 5,000 metres. They quite often receive a staggering amount of snow because, as on Canada’s moist Pacific coast, humid air from the Black Sea that falls as rain over Sochi turns into snow as it rises. But if it is 15C or 20C in Sochi during the winter, which sometimes happens, it doesn’t get warm enough for precipitation to fall as snow in the mountains.
“If we get enough snow in December, it can be warmer in January and February,” said Yves Dimier, the alpine manager for the Sochi Games and a former alpine racer who participated in the 1994 Winter Olympics. “If it is warm, well, we will do what we would do anywhere else, and make do with what we have.”
The happy scene in Krasnaya Polyana today contrasts sharply with the situation here last winter. It rained often in the mountains then and parts of the alpine and cross-country courses were scarred by bald patches of dirt.
The story may be apocryphal, but because of concerns about the region’s unpredictable weather, it has been reported here that Sochi organizers asked shamans from some of Russia’s many ethnic communities to pray for snow.
What is certain is that the organizers created what might be called a snow bank. Using a technique developed by Finns, about 500,000 cubic metres of snow was collected last spring, covered with insulated blankets and left near the alpine courses.
With this snow all around him and bows of nearby pine trees bent over by fresh snow, the deputy head of the biathlon competition, Alexei Kobelev, was obviously breathing a lot easier.
“The forecast was for this year to be colder than last year because the Black Sea got colder earlier this year,” Kobelev said as snowblowers buzzed and churned in the background.
“Even if it becomes a lot warmer now, we have enough artificial snow stored.”
However, because this winter’s snow has settled so quickly and in such vast quantities on what are often treacherously steep slopes, experts have been closely monitoring potential avalanches so that if necessary they can trigger small snowslides to prevent potentially catastrophic bigger ones.
This is a particular fear where the men’s and women’s downhill races will take place, as their paths slice across known avalanche zones.
Still, mindful of how fickle the weather can be at any ski resort, organizers have more than 550 snow cannons working around the clock in temperatures that have dipped as low as -16C., adding mounds of artificial snow to nature’s bounty.