No more glory for former Olympic cities as climate warms
rbarnes
Posted On janvier 28, 2014
By Margaret Munro
The planet is warming so quickly that a new report predicts Winter Olympic cities like Vancouver and Sochi will be out of luck in future.
It says only six of the previous 19 Winter Olympic sites will be cold enough to reliably host the Games by the end the century. Even under conservative climate change projections it says Olympic sites, such as Vancouver, Sochi, Chamonix in France, Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany will be too warm by 2050.
“Fewer and fewer traditional winter sports regions will be able to host a Olympic Winter Games in a warmer world,” lead author Daniel Scott, an expert on global tourism at the University of Waterloo, said in a release issued with the report to be published Thursday.
“The implications for winter sports are unmistakable,” said the report by the researchers at Waterloo and Austria’s Management Center Innsbruck.
Olympics organizers already spend a fortune helping Mother Nature with “weather risk management strategies” to ensure athletes have snow and ice to ski, skate and slide on. In the last 30 years refrigerated tracks and jumps and snow and ice machines have become common fixtures at Olympic venues.
