“For the ski racers, it’s just like paradise” as man-made snow blankets the slopes

BEIJING — There is little that’s natural about these Winter Olympic Games, including the snow.

When Beijing bid for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, everyone knew the snow would have to be artificial. The Chinese capital had very little snow in the winter, actually little precipitation of any kind. The mountains were so arid, the amount of water per person is comparable to deserts.

Yet this was no snow job. This was reality.

But organizers got to work to generate billions and billions of flakes, using dozens of snow generators and hundreds of snowblowers to produce 1.2 million cubic meters of powder.

So far the effort to create a winter wonderland has been met with a blanket of praise.

“Feedback has been outstanding from the athletes, through the training period and first days of competition,” said Kit McConnell, International Olympic Committee (IOC) Sports Director. “The focus is on doing this in a sustainable way, but also insuring the athletes have an outstanding field of play on which to compete at the Olympic level.”

Bernhard Russi, chairman of the alpine ski committee of the International Ski Federation and a long-time course designer, said the snow is “absolutely perfect.”

“I think for the ski racers, it’s just like paradise,” said Russi, who won the Olympic gold medal in the downhill in 1972 and the silver in 1976.

He said the athletes have told him the snow is easy to ski, which he said means “you can make the turn wherever you want. It’s beautiful for skiing.”

And the artificial snow is also used for snowboarding, biathlon, cross country, Nordic combined, ski jumping and freestyle events.

This is the first time Olympic athletes will compete almost entirely on artificial snow, but the man-made flakes have been around for decades.

Wei Qinghua, mountain operation manager at the Zhangjiakou and Guyangshu venue cluster, said the man-made snow has been used in every Winter Olympic Games since the early 2000s.

“Based on the requirements for the quality and volume of ice for the Olympic Winter Games,” he said, “made snow-making technology is an essential technology for us. And it can also be used by the commercial ski resorts when there is not sufficient snowfall.

“Strictly speaking, we are not using 100 percent artificial snow. We do have some natural snow on the course, and in the Guyangshu venue cluster about 10 percent of the snow is actually natural snow.”

But Wei said 100 percent artificial snow is used in areas such as the landing hill of the ski jumping center. There is a requirement that the landing hill must be 45 centimeters thick.

The amount of snow produced can be very carefully controlled to meet these rules.

Technology has improved greatly since Salt Lake City in 2002, Wei said. “For example, currently the snow-making technology is from Italy, it is TechnoAlpin,” he said, noting that the company has about 60 percent of the global market share.

“That machine can make different types of snow ... from No. 1 to No. 10,” he said. “The smaller the number the lighter the snow. For example, for cross-country skiing and biathlon we use No. 3 snow and the status and condition of the snow is quite good right now. For the landing hill of the ski jumping centre we used the No. 5 snow, which can be perfectly fixed on the 33.6-degree slope.”

It also has an automatic control system, taking the humidity, the temperature and other factors into consideration in the process of snow-making so as to improve the conversion ratio from water to snow and also improve our efficiency of water use.

Artificial snow is like a tightly packed frozen slush. A high-pressure pump breaks up the water droplets, which then crystalize into flakes.

To get ready for the Winter Games, a dried riverbed was flooded and water was diverted to pumping stations from a reservoir that supplies Beijing. Hundreds of farm families were also forced to move. They were not allowed to irrigate their fields in order to conserve groundwater.

However, Russi said ski racers and organizers actually prefer natural snow.

“But, in order to get the right hardness of the snow, we have to add some water,” he said. “And if you add water to the snow, basically you’re making nothing else but man-made snow.”

Russi also said that when the course is ready, it’s not good to have natural snow on top of it.

The course designer said in the past five to 10 years, races have been contested only on man-made snow, sometimes mixed with natural snow, but ultimately resulting in “the compact snow for the power which those racers are able to put down on the snow.”

It’s not as popular among athletes from other sports. “Artificial snow is icier, therefore faster and more dangerous,” Johanna Talihar, a biathlete from Estonia, told the Associated Press in January. “It also hurts more if you fall outside of the course when there is no fluffy snowbank, but a rocky and muddy hard ground.”

Most of the ski and snowboarding events are in Zhangjiakou, about 110 miles northwest of Beijing.

Bobsled, luge and alpine skiing events are in the mountains at Yanqing, about 45 miles from downtown Beijing. That area is rich in water resources.

The drawback to this technological marvel is that in an era in which sustainability is a primary concern, snow-making has a high environmental cost. However, the IOC says the electricity used by the generators is from renewable wind and solar energy sources. Snow farming, which is preserving and relocating previous accumulation, and harvesting melted snow in retaining lakes at the end of the season will help with water conservation.

Because it is so cold, there is less melting and thus a reduced need to constantly produce more snow.

The ideal conditions for making artificial snow are a “wet-bulb temperature” of about 20 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a combination of the actual temperature and the amount of moisture in the air.

“In the entire Guyangshu venue cluster, the source of water we used for snow making only comes from rainfall and also the surface run-off,” Wei said, “For all the three venues here we planned to use 300,090 tonnes of water for snow making, but currently we used 360,000 tonnes of water for snow making. Compared with the water reserve in Chongli area, it is less than 1 percent of the water reserve in Chongli.

“The water can be recycled. For the water from the melted snow, we have a reservoir and two lakes, which can hold 200,000 tons and 50,000 tons of water separately to store the water. The stored water can be used for agricultural irrigation, for tourism and for landscaping, therefore the local life will not be affected.”

Now, if only they could do something about the wind.