Tahoe will soon be too warm for Winter Games, researchers find

Many former Olympic cities unable to host in future, climate models show

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Towering Squaw Peak has groomed generations of America’s most elite winter Olympians, from racer Tamara McKinney and freestylist Jonny Moseley to six members of this year’s Alpine Team USA.

But Lake Tahoe’s snow will be too patchy and too wet to host future Winter Olympic Games, according to a new analysis, dashing hopes of repeating the 1960 honor that built the region into a powerhouse of winter sports.

Because of climate change, the resort — formerly Squaw Valley but now named Palisades Tahoe — is no longer a dependable site for the Games, with the risk of scant and soggy snow during more than half of February, according to an international team of researchers led by the University of Waterloo in Canada.

With continued high emissions, by midcentury the Olympics will be too hot to handle for the resort. And estimated 50% to 89% of its February days will have insufficient or wet snow and 25% to 50% of days will be too rainy or warm for competition. By 2080, it will be unreliable nearly 90% of the month.

“It is one of the more vulnerable locations to climate change,” said Waterloo researcher Natalie Knowles, a former Truckee resident and ski racer who now investigates the impact of global warming on winter sports.

Without a rapid shift away from burning fossil fuels, “things are extremely unreliable — in terms of having the right snow, the right weather,” she said. “There’s an inconsistency that’s difficult to compete on.”

The report comes just as the world prepares for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, starting Friday. It will be the first Winter Games to use almost entirely artificial snow. Snowmaking is becoming as much of an Olympic tradition as gold medals: In 2014, 80% of the snow in Sochi, Russia, was manufactured; four years later, that rose to 90% at South Korea’s Pyeongchang Games.

But even artificial snow isn’t enough to save sites, like Palisades Tahoe, that will be too warm. And the storied history of other Olympic sites – including France’s Chamonix and Austria’s Innsbruck — also appears to be coming to a close, the report concluded.

By the end of the century, if the pace of global warming continues, only one former host venue — the mountainous northern Japanese city of Sapporo — will have enough snow to host the Winter Games.

However, if the Paris Climate Agreement emission targets can be achieved, the number of reliable host cities jumps to eight: Salt Lake City, Lake Placid, Vancouver, Calgary, Lillehammer, Oslo, Nagano and Sapporo.

Using climate data from previous Winter Games locations and applying climate-change models to predict future winter weather conditions, the team found that the average February daytime temperature of host cities has steadily increased – from 32.7 °F in the 1920s until the 1950s, to 43.3°F in the first half of this century, including in Beijing.

“Climate change is on the minds of anybody who loves this sport,” said Palisades Tahoe spokesperson Alex Spychalsky. “Our whole industry relies on being able to access the right conditions.”

But as the planet warms, Olympic prospects dim.