Sochi has become the Summer Winter Games
SOCHI, Russia — To be honest, I am worried about the mascots, trapped in those huge fur suits. Also, the Kazakh Santa. On Thursday, the guy in the Kazakh Santa costume stopped in the middle of the Olympic Park, and leaned his staff with the snowflake at the top on a bench, and tugged at his fake white beard so he could gulp down the water bottle given to him by the other Kazakh in the heavy military coat and the nearfur hat. The man in the hat and coat looked at the Santa and shrugged.
“Hot, yes,” he grunted, nodding. “Hot. Very hot.”
Yes, very hot. Sochi has become the Summer Winter Games and, to be honest, it feels glorious. It reached 18 C Thursday down by the water, and felt warmer in the sun. Up in the mountains, it was set to hit 13. Jackets are vanishing. Rivulets are running. Vancouver was the spring Olympics, sure, and we had to carry around snow with helicopters to make everything work. This is like the Winter Olympics if they were held in San Diego.
“I’d like to compensate with a margarita, chips and salsa, but that will have to wait ‘til after the competition,” said American Nordic combined star Todd Lodwick. Asked if she would go to the beach during her team’s day off Thursday, Canadian curler Dawn McEwen said “No, no beach. I’ll burn.”
People are swimming in the Black Sea, though, down at the beach. This is beeron-a-patio weather, except not only are there a shortage of patios in the Olympic Park, there are only three places in the Olympic Park that sell beer, and none of them really advertise the fact. The nearest real patio where you can sit with a beer and contemplate the palm trees in the Olympic Park is outside the media centre, which is not open to the public, so perhaps at this point we in the media should accept any inconveniences that we have been handed and shut the hell up. Cheers.
Up in the mountains, meanwhile, the snowpack is giving in, and the Russians are tapping their snow reserves. Or not. On Feb. 11 Sochi spokeswoman Alexsandra Kosterina said they trucked in the snow they had squirrelled away — “the snow was stored from the previous season in insulation materials,” said Kosterina — and two days later she said she hadn’t. Maybe it melted.
This has caused problems, all over. The middle of the halfpipe is slush, and Canadian slopestyler Dana Howell said she felt like a scuba diver after practice, because she was soaked; she called it spring skiing. American Nordic combined skier Billy Demong told The Wall Street Journal it felt like “skiing on a layer of fur,” and British cross-country skier Andrew Young said, “I’m a big guy — (187 pounds), and I just sink in this slush,” after failing to qualify in the men’s sprint free.
The athletes have complained that some of the courses almost look muddy, and crashes have been blamed on the snow. American Bobby Brown competed in the ski slopestyle final in a T-shirt. Max Cobb, a technical delegate in biathlon, told the Olympic News Service, “I’ve been in every Olympics since 1992 and we’ve never had temperatures like this for a competition.”
Hot, yes. When the controversy erupted about the topless Lebanese skier who was photographed by 55- year- old Mexican pop singer and photographer and Fiat heir and six-time Olympic skier Prince Hubertus von Hohenlohe — none of the words in that sentence were made up, which is one more reason to marvel at the world in which we live — the first thought might be that she might have been topless here. Because frankly, this is the weather for it. The fact that Vladimir Putin hasn’t been seen shirtless yet might be the upset of these Olympics.
Sochi, of course, is a summer resort town, full of palm trees by the sea.
“You’d have to spend a long time searching the map of this huge country to find someplace with no snow,” Boris Nemtsov, a member of the Russian Opposition Coordination Council, told the documentary Putin’s Games. “Putin found it.”
You can see why you would want to conduct a nation-building experiment here, because it really is like Vancouver. It’s a beautiful place.
Still, the average February temperature in Sochi is 10 C, and the forecast doesn’t expect that to happen until after the weekend. The last Winter Olympics with an average daily high that was still below freezing was Lillehammer in 1994 and, yes, Calgary was hit with a Chinook in 1988, and events had to be rescheduled, and they used artificial snow. In Calgary the high reached 17 C, so maybe this is just life on this blue-and-green planet we call home.
Except as noted by the New York Times, University of Waterloo climatologist Daniel Scott used climate models to predict that by 2050, 10 of the 19 cities that have hosted the Winter Games would be cold enough to do so again. By 2100, that number drops to six. So, uh, get ready for stories about the adorable, doomed stray penguins at the 2102 Antarctic Olympics. Perhaps someone will adopt them, and smuggle them home.
And as the Times, wrote, “Europe has lost half of its Alpine glacial ice since the 1850s, and if climate change is not reined in, two-thirds of European ski resorts will be likely to close by 2100.” Snow is melting elsewhere, too. It’s almost as if we should be worrying about the planet, or something.
But it’s so warm here, and it’s hard to concentrate when you’re searching for a beer, and people are just sitting back, soaking it in. The American South is getting pounded by ice storms, and England is flooding, but it is winter in Sochi, where the snow-capped Caucasus Mountains turn pink when the sun sets over the sea. How long the mountains stay snow-capped, though, is anybody’s guess.