Disturbing prospect. Already threatened by additional costs, the future of the Olympic Games could have to face another, far more formidable danger: global warming. According to a very serious Canadian study, the number of cities capable of hosting the event could melt in the decades to come like an ice cube dipped in a bowl of tea.
The study was led by an academic, Daniel Scott, professor of geography at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario. Initially published in 2014, it has just been updated taking into account data from the PyeongChang 2018 and Beijing 2022 Games.
Its results give little cause for optimism. Daniel Scott has examined all the host cities of the Winter Games since the creation of the event in 1924 in Chamonix. For each of them, he studied the effects of global warming. Then he projected his figures for 2050. Results: of the 21 cities that have already hosted the Games, or are expected to do so in the near future (PyeongChang 2018, Beijing 2022), more than a third present a high risk of no longer experiencing temperatures low enough to allow skiing.
For three of them, Sochi in Russia (2014), Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany (1936), and Vancouver in Canada (2010), the Winter Games will soon appear like a figment of the imagination. In six other cases, rising temperatures would pose a very significant risk to the organizers: Oslo (1952), Chamonix (1924), Innsbruck (1964 and 1976), Sarajevo (1984), Grenoble (1968), and finally Squaw Valley ( 1960).
According to the Canadian geographer, the seven editions of the Winter Games contested until 1960 experienced an average temperature of 0,4 degrees Celsius. Subsequently, the mercury rose to 3,1 degrees during the period from 1960 to 2000. Since then, the Games in Salt Lake City (2002), Turin (2006), Vancouver (2010), and Sochi (2014), were contested under an average temperature of 7,8 degrees.
For Daniel Scott, there is no doubt that the IOC will increasingly find itself faced with a shortage of candidates for the Winter Games. And, this time, the colossal addition of the Sochi Olympics will have nothing to do with it. The Canadian geographer suggests that only 11 of the 19 cities that have already hosted the Games could still do so in 2050. At the end of the century, there would only be 8.
Last February, a comparable study, carried out by Swiss researchers from the Snow and Avalanche Research Institute (SLF) and the Lausanne Polytechnic School, reached fairly similar conclusions. It revealed that the practice of winter sports could not be guaranteed by the end of the century below 2.500 m altitude.
In the shorter term, finding sufficient snow could turn into a complex treasure hunt for the national teams. In the United States, for example, several winter sports resorts are already predicting that the length of their season will undoubtedly be halved by 2050.
