Pierre de Coubertin never wanted a Winter Olympics. He spent the best part of two decades lobbying, politicking and organising before he finally got the first summer Games up and running in Athens in 1896. Its winter sibling though, well, “the great inferiority of these snow sports …” De Coubertin once wrote, “is that they are completely useless, with no useful application whatsoever.” He allowed ice skating and ice hockey, the two stadium sports, to be part of the roster for the early summer Games, but it was another two decades before he was persuaded to hold a separate winter event.
That was in 1924, in Chamonix. The 100th anniversary fell midway between the last winter Games in Beijing and this one in Milano Cortina. It’s an interesting event to look back on. It was described at the time as a 10-day “winter sports week”, an “appendage” De Coubertin called it, to that year’s summer Games in Paris. There were 16 countries competing in five sports, with four more, including “military patrol”, added as demonstration events. It was only later, after the International Olympic Committee had become more interested in burnishing its own history, that this knockabout event was officially designated as the very first Winter Olympic Games.
A century later, this Winter Olympics, like every Winter Olympics before it, will be the largest yet – 3,500 athletes, 93 countries, 19 days of competition, 16 different events, and everywhere an irrepressible sense that, like a party thrown by a teenager while their parents are away, this has all got a little out of control. All of a sudden Mariah Carey has turned up, ski jumpers are injecting acid into their penises, and the hosts are running around trying to plug the leaks in the €270m ice hockey arena they were compelled to build in the middle of 110 acres of brownfield south of Milan, which will only ever be needed for the next two and a half weeks.
These Milano Cortina Games are, in many ways, an attempt at retrenchment, an effort to redress grotesque excesses, which spiralled so madly out of control that Sochi in 2014 became the most expensive Games in history, and Beijing in 2022 required the Chinese to fabricate an entire winter sports resort out of concrete, steel and phoney snow. The IOC has found it increasingly difficult to get anyone sensible to want to take them on at all. In the past 12 years, Calgary, Innsbruck, Krakow, Oslo, Sapporo, Sion and Stockholm all dropped bids because of a lack of public enthusiasm.
Which is why this edition of the Games is being shared across northern Italy, rather than rooted in one city. In one way it’s made them more feasible, in another it now means that it takes at least 11 hours, and a lot of good luck, to get from the curling venue to the men’s downhill.
The next one, which is being spread out across the French Alps, will be similar. The IOC is also trying to ground the Games in countries that actually have a culture of winter sport. This won’t last long. Saudi Arabia have sent two skiers here this year, an advance guard for the $500bn winter sports resort city they are building in the desert, which was – until plans changed this week – due to host the Asian Winter Games in 2029, and, no doubt, a Winter Olympics beyond it.
Even here, in a country that has hosted the Winter Olympics twice already, it is hard to avoid the feeling of just how ersatz and unsustainable this all is. Cortina has plenty of snow. But it’s not necessarily the sort athletes like or TV schedulers can rely upon. So the organisers are using approximately 100m litres of water to make something like 50,000 tonnes of the stuff for these Games. They had to build an entire reservoir just to service it. Cortina already has an ice track, too, the one they built the last time they had the Olympics here in 1956. It was shut in 2008 because no one used it and has been derelict ever since.
Now they have a second, cut, at huge expense, right through a forest of ancient larch trees.
According to analysis done by the World Wildlife Foundation of Italy, which is part of the Open Olympics movement, 60% of the construction works for these Games have been done without any environmental impact assessment, under the cover of this mega-event. All this at a moment when almost 200 ski resorts have already been forced to close in the French Alps alone because of a truncated winter season caused by global heating and declining snowfall. All these resorts, and the towns around them, are in a position where they now need to fake it to make it.
The IOC makes great play of its environmental credentials. But slapping the word “sustainability” on a brochure listing how much printed paper you’re saving by sticking everything online doesn’t add up to much when the bulldozers out back are chopping down a forest to make way for a bobsled run you need to provide for a fortnight of sliding competitions.
De Coubertin changed his mind about winter Games in the end, but he wasn’t wrong about any of this. A lot of these sports don’t have any utility beyond recreation. With the exceptions of Nordic skiing and the skating events, many of the rest were literally invented by British aristocrats on holiday in St Moritz as something fun to do during the winter. And away from the handful of countries across the northern hemisphere that have their own indigenous cultures of skiing and skating, they still exist largely as a privilege for the increasingly small band of well-resourced tourists who can afford them.
You might say that recreation is all the reason anyone needs. Going fast is its own reward, and watching other people do it makes for great TV. The Games is going to be one hell of a show, full of twists, flips, turns, dashes and crashes, last-minute-winners and late-breaking stones sliding right on to the button during the 10th end. It is a gloriously silly business, and one which, even after the IOC’s attempts to roll it back, has an increasingly serious cost as it continues to grow out of all proportion.
