Olympics 2022 -- Changing climate conditions fuel concerns about future of winter sports

The skiers and snowboarders competing at the Beijing Winter Olympics starting later this week will be the first group to chase their Olympic medals on mountains blanketed with 100% artificial snow.

Training and competing on man-made snow has become an unavoidable reality as warmer temperatures and shifting weather patterns have made it increasingly hard to rely on nature. Artificial snow has been used to supplement Olympic sites since the 1980 Lake Placid Games and has steadily increased in the past couple decades, according to a research report on Olympic snowmaking published last week.

«Natural snow is always better,» said Jamie Anderson, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in snowboard slopestyle and silver medalist in the 2018 Olympic debut of snowboard big air who will be competing for Team USA again in Beijing. «The consistency, the texture, all of it.»

With only light dustings so far this season in Yanqing and Zhangjiakou, the two locations that will host mountain events in China, snowmakers at the Olympics will need to feed 49 million gallons of water — enough to fill roughly 75 Olympic-sized swimming pools — through their machines to create an estimated 1.2 million cubic meters of snow, diverting significant energy and water resources in an arid region. More broadly, the researchers said roughly 95% of the world's ski resorts count on snow guns or snow cannons to blanket their runs.

«I'm really hoping this sounds an alarm bell about how we continue to grow sport in a sustainable way,» said Madeleine Orr, a lecturer at Loughborough University in London and founder of The Sport Ecology Group, who co-authored the snowmaking report.

Orr's group worked on the report along with Protect Our Winters, an athlete-driven