Yanqing, which will host alpine skiing, sledding, bobsleighing and skeleton, displays a lunar landscape, with white stripes sinuously descending across the meadows
Everything seems ready in Beijing for the Winter Olympics, which will begin on February 4th. The images of the futuristic systems are spectacular, the cameras are ready to switch on, the organization, as always, will not be flawed. But looking at the photos that come from China, something seems to be missing, something important: snow.
“Why was the Winter Olympics awarded to Beijing?” the “Daily Mail” asked in a headline days ago. The reason perhaps lies only in the fact that Oslo withdrew at the last moment and that only Alma Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, remained in contention with China. The Chinese have more money than the Kazakhs and therefore offer greater guarantees, but Alma Ata could at least boast the setting of the Transilian Ala-tau, whose snowy peaks reach 4,800 meters. In Beijing, however, there is really no trace of snow.
Nor can it be said that this is an unfortunate year, with little rainfall. Also last year, around the “National Alpine Ski Center” of Yanqing, the main venue of the Games 80 kilometers from Beijing, only two centimeters of snow fell between January and March, less than in London or Madrid. The images coming from China are disturbing, they seem to have been taken by someone who is trying to bring winter sports to Mars or the Moon. The ski jumping center is impressive with its futuristic look, but sits in the middle of barren brown hills with a scruffy and dirty look. The snowboard slope is in the middle of a concrete-filled industrial area, dominated by the impressive cooling towers of an old steel mill.
Yanqing, which will host alpine skiing, sledding, bobsleighing and skeleton, displays a truly lunar landscape, with white stripes sinuously descending across meadows that show a desperate need for some water. Water is becoming the main problem in Beijing and the whole region, but 150 million liters of it will be used to shoot artificial snow on the slopes with cannons powered, it was pointed out, by renewable energy. The Olympics have been organized with a commitment to respecting the environment and their mascot is a Panda, but no one seems to worry too much about the waste of water that will be necessary to compete in the races. Chinese officials simply say that the water is not wasted, because it is known that the snow then melts and goes back into circulation.
Even the athletes don’t protest that much. They are now used to competing on artificial snow: it had already happened in 2014 at the Russian Olympics in Sochi, a city near the sea, where only 20% of the snow was natural, and at the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. due to climate change, it is increasingly difficult to find snow-covered places that lend themselves to hosting complex events such as the Winter Games, but looking for a solution in Beijing seemed to many a real gamble. The International Olympic Committee, however, knew what it was facing and in a preliminary assessment it had stressed that Zhangjiakou and Yanqing would have “completely relied on artificial snow”.
According to a report published by “Nature”, the depletion of groundwater in Northern China is one of the most serious environmental problems globally, due to intensive agricultural irrigation, increasing urbanization and the increasingly arid climate, which causes sandstorms that often hit the capital too. But for a few weeks the available water will be used to produce snow, so no one can say that the Beijing Winter Olympics were not a success. The year of the Tiger will begin on February 1st and Xi Jinping wants to exploit it well, arriving at the October Communist Party Congress with more medals on his chest to be confirmed in a third term. And it will certainly not be the lack of a little snow to prevent it.
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