The Winter Olympics Aren't Winter Anymore

Good morning, and welcome to HigherIQ. It's Friday, February sixth. The Winter Olympics open tonight in Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy. Over the next two weeks, you'll watch athletes hurl themselves down snow-covered mountains at eighty miles an hour. You'll see ski jumpers soar over pristine Alpine landscapes. You'll assume, because it's the Winter Olympics, that you're watching winter.

You're not.

You're watching three million cubic yards of manufactured ice crystals, pumped out of snow cannons onto brown grass. You're watching a sport that has spent the last forty-six years slowly decoupling from the season it's named after. And you're watching what might be the final generation of Winter Games as we know them. Today we're asking a question the opening ceremony won't address: what happens to the Winter Olympics when winter stops showing up? The first Winter Olympics to use artificial snow was Lake Placid in nineteen eighty. It was an emergency measure. An unusually dry winter had left the Adirondacks bare, and organizers scrambled to truck in machine-made powder to save the Games. It worked. The races happened. Everyone moved on. But here's the progression nobody talks about. Vancouver in twenty ten used artificial snow as a supplement. Sochi in twenty fourteen was eighty percent fake. Pyeongchang in twenty eighteen hit ninety percent. Beijing in twenty twenty-two became the first Winter Olympics held on one hundred percent manufactured snow, every flake pumped out of cannons in a region that averages less than six inches of natural snowfall per winter. And now Milan Cortina. The Italian Alps, one of the most storied skiing regions on Earth. Cortina hosted these Games seventy years ago, in nineteen fifty-six. Back then, the snow just fell. This year, organizers have manufactured one point six million cubic meters of artificial snow, roughly twice the volume of the Roman Colosseum. They built new high-altitude reservoirs specifically to store the water. They installed over three hundred snow guns.

And here's the detail that should stop you cold: Cortina has lost forty-one freezing days per year since it last hosted the Olympics. Average temperatures have risen six point four degrees Fahrenheit. The ski lifts now whir up mountainsides of bare rock and brown grass, with narrow white strips of artificial snow cutting through like highway lane markers. Artificial snow isn't snow. That sounds pedantic, but the physics matter. Natural snow forms when water vapor in the atmosphere freezes around tiny particles of dust or pollen. The crystals are intricate, branching, about ten percent ice and ninety percent air. That's what gives fresh powder its soft, forgiving quality. Machine-made snow is different. Snow cannons spray water droplets into cold air, where they freeze into tiny pellets. The result is roughly thirty percent ice and seventy percent air, three times denser than the real thing. It's harder, faster, icier. Athletes describe it as more like a frozen highway than a ski slope. Some competitors prefer it. The International Ski Federation says artificial snow creates more consistent conditions from top to bottom. But consistency cuts both ways. When you hit a patch of natural snow after skiing on manufactured ice, your edges behave differently. When temperatures rise and the manufactured snow softens unevenly, ruts form. Athletes catch edges. Crashes happen.

And there's a ceiling to what machines can do. You can manufacture snow, but you can't manufacture cold. When temperatures climb above freezing, even artificial snow turns to slush. Courses have to be constantly groomed. Races get delayed. Sometimes they get canceled entirely. The twenty twenty-four Alpine Skiing World Cup in Mont Tremblant, Canada, was scrapped because it was simply too warm. Here's the math that should concern anyone who cares about winter sports. Researchers at the University of Waterloo and the University of Innsbruck studied ninety-three locations around the world with the infrastructure to host elite winter competitions. By the twenty fifties, only fifty-two of them will have reliable snow depth and temperatures to stage a Winter Olympics. By twenty eighty, if emissions aren't dramatically reduced, that number drops further. Under a high-emissions scenario, the study found that almost none of the previous Winter Olympics host cities would remain climatically viable by the end of the century.

Let that sink in. Of the twenty-one cities that have hosted Winter Olympics in the past century, most of them are on track to become unsuitable within our lifetimes. This isn't hypothetical. Italy has lost two hundred sixty-five ski resorts in the last five years alone. The Alpine glaciers that athletes once trained on year-round are retreating so fast that summer training camps have had to relocate. And the places that can still reliably produce winter conditions are becoming more remote, more expensive, and harder to access.

The irony is that the Winter Olympics keep choosing hosts that accelerate this problem. Sochi was subtropical. Beijing was arid. The energy required to manufacture snow at industrial scale, to refrigerate bobsled tracks, to truck in ice, all of it burns fossil fuels that make winters warmer. In Cortina, the contradictions are visible from the town square. To build the new bobsled track for these Games, workers cut down hundreds of larch trees from an ancient forest. These were trees that had stood for centuries, through both World Wars, in a region that soldiers on both sides had the sensitivity to leave untouched. An Italian environmental activist named Luigi Casanova was there the day the chainsaws arrived. Standing beside him was the cellist Mario Brunello, who has long advocated for protecting the Dolomites. Brunello played his cello while the trees fell behind him, ten or fifteen meters away, the melody mixing with the crash of timber.

The organizers promised sustainability. They pledged to "showcase the importance of protecting sensitive mountain ecosystems." They planted trees to offset emissions. They built water reservoirs that use gravity instead of pumps. The new bobsled track has a green roof. But they also chose to build a brand new track instead of renovating an existing one in Turin from the two thousand six Games, which could have been fixed for a fraction of the cost. National pride won out. The infrastructure minister, Matteo Salvini, insisted the Games be fully Italian. When environmentalists objected, he accused them of trying to sabotage the Olympics and betray Italy.

Italy has fifty-nine registered bobsledders. The track will be used for two weeks of Olympic competition. So here's what we're actually watching when we tune in tonight. We're watching a sport that was invented around winter, now manufacturing winter around the sport. We're watching billions of dollars spent to simulate conditions that used to be free. We're watching ancient forests cleared for infrastructure that might be obsolete within a generation. And we're watching the IOC consider, for the first time, whether future Winter Games should be held earlier in the season, before February becomes too warm to fake it anymore. The athletes are still extraordinary. The competition is still real. But the backdrop has become a special effect.

This isn't a story about whether climate change is happening. That debate is over. This is a story about what we're willing to pretend in order to keep doing the things we've always done. How much energy we'll burn to make snow that doesn't fall. How many trees we'll cut to build tracks we'll use for two weeks. How long we'll keep calling it the Winter Olympics when winter is increasingly optional. The Games start tonight. Enjoy them. The skiing will be spectacular. Just know that what you're watching isn't winter. It's a memory of winter, reconstructed at enormous cost, for as long as we can still afford to build it. Speaking of things that aren't quite what they seem. Super Bowl sixty is Sunday at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara. Seahawks versus Patriots. But the story dominating sports radio this week isn't the game. It's a power substation.

The San Francisco forty-niners, who play at Levi's Stadium, had a brutal year for injuries. Nick Bosa tore his ACL. Fred Warner broke his ankle. George Kittle ruptured his Achilles. The team spent over ninety-five million in salary on players who ended the season on injured reserve, the most in the league by nearly twenty million dollars. Then a viral post offered an explanation. Right next to the forty-niners' practice fields sits a Silicon Valley Power substation, one of those fenced-off lots full of transformers that steps down high-voltage electricity for local use. A self-described "quantum biology practitioner," not a doctor, posted a theory that electromagnetic fields from the substation are weakening players' tendons. These are non-ionizing fields, the same kind your phone and microwave emit, not the radiation that damages cells. But the post got twenty-two million views.

Scientists have been unequivocal. The NFL's chief medical officer said there's nothing in sports medicine literature supporting the theory. A Bristol professor who specializes in EMF research called it "nonsense." Owner Jed York pointed out the team has practiced there since the late eighties. Jerry Rice trained there. It didn't seem to hurt Jerry Rice.

The forty-niners do have a real injury problem. Something is going on. But electromagnetic fields aren't the answer. What's interesting is why the theory went viral. When the real explanation is boring or unsatisfying, people reach for a spooky, simple villain. That's how misinformation fills the void left by unsatisfying truths. The power lines are easier to blame than "sometimes teams just have bad luck." That's your Friday. Enjoy the Opening Ceremony tonight, enjoy the Super Bowl Sunday. Stay informed, stay curious, and the next time someone mentions the Winter Olympics, you'll know what you're actually watching: a memory of winter, manufactured at enormous cost, for as long as we can still afford it. We'll see you tomorrow.