The 2022 Winter Olympics will be held in Beijing, China with many of the events being held in the Zhangjiakou and Yanqing Zones near the city. The only problem is the mountains that will host the ski events receive basically no snowfall. In fact, the area that will be hosting the ski events averages a snowpack of just 2 inches, making the 2022 games the first Winter Olympics to be held on 100% man-made snow.
“The Zhangjiakou and Yanqing Zones have minimal annual snowfall and for the Games would rely completely on artificial snow. There would be no opportunity to haul snow from higher elevations for contingency maintenance to the racecourses so a contingency plan would rely on stockpiled man-made snow. Beijing 2022 presented weather data from 2014-2015 indicating a particular risk for Yanqing in terms of the quality and quantity of snow.”
[sigallery id=”xjYz74FuC5pxPJFb3JLLXa” title=”Chinese Winter Olympics Ski Venue” type=”sigallery”]
In an interview with ABC News, ski resort designer Wei Qinghua said, “There’s absolutely no problem with the water supply for snowmaking.” These sentiments were then followed up by Chinese Resort officials, who pointed out that South Korean and Japanese national ski teams recently used the proposed host mountains as their training grounds instead of the traditionally utilized European resorts.