The “Unmountain” winter games

I don’t know about you, but for me the Olympic Winter Games mean snow-covered, beautiful landscape, not brown, dystopian looking hills like the Xiaohaituo Alpine Skiing Field, site of the alpine skiing events looks like. 

Of course, that place, in the Yanqing District, is a suburban district in northwest Beijing, so it’s hard to expect a landscape looking like the surroundings of Megève or Kitzbuhel in what is a heap of dirt crisscrossed by stripes of man-made snow. 

This, of course, makes all of that “fake snow” more conspicuously looking as it is said that 50 million gallons of water to make the Alpine events possible, not to mention the huge amount of coal-generated electric power needed to transform it into snow. 

We’ve drifted far away from the Cortina or the Squaw Valley Olympics and devolved into the inner-city version of winter sports. 

Not a pretty sight! With this setup, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) faces an embarrassing reality about the environmental cost of the Games, including claims the alpine runs were constructed in a protected nature reserve. 

“These could be the most unsustainable Winter Olympics ever held,” said Professor Carmen de Jong, a geographer at the University of Strasbourg. She points out that man-made snow is water- and energy-intensive, while also damaging the health of the soil and causing erosion. 

No wonder I’m intuitively not impressed, but again with the money-hungry and dictator-friendly IOC, what else should we expect!