The environmentally unfriendly secret of winter sports is that many competitions take place on artificial snow. China’s water-scarce capital had to go to enormous lengths to make enough of it.
By Matthew Futterman and Raymond ZhongPublished Feb. 5, 2022Updated Feb. 6, 2022阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版Leer en español
“BEIJING — China did not move mountains to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. But it flooded a dried riverbed, diverted water from a key reservoir that supplies Beijing and resettled hundreds of farmers and their families, all to feed one of the most extensive snow-making operations in the history of the Games.
This is what happens when the International Olympic Committee decides to bring the Winter Games to a place almost completely lacking in one of the main ingredients for winter sports: snow. What’s more, Beijing and its nearby mountains did not have that much water to make the artificial kind, either.”