SOCHI, Russia — The biggest worry among organizers for next year’s Winter Olympics is not whether the sites will be in order, or that the 30-mile road and the new railroad tracks and the thousands of hotel rooms all being built from scratch will be complete, or that the stands will be full of fans despite this city’s remote location.
The biggest worry is the one the Russians cannot control: the weather.
And they have plenty of reasons to worry.
The last Winter Games, in Vancouver in 2010, were bedeviled by unseasonably mild temperatures in British Columbia. Alpine ski races were persistently postponed because of fog and slushy conditions. Hidden hay bales took the place of snow to build mounds for various courses. A lasting image of those Games is that of helicopters ferrying buckets of snow to the snowboarding site.
Sochi is more worrisome. This city of nearly 500,000, filled with palm trees and year-round flowers, hugs the shore of the Black Sea. Unlike Vancouver, where most of the outdoor mountain events were held 90 minutes away around Whistler, the venues in the Caucasus Mountains are about 30 minutes away, up a winding canyon.
There is a plan, and it does not include helicopters and hay bales. Sochi organizers, fully aware of the problems in Vancouver, have installed what they say is the biggest snowmaking operation in Europe. More than 400 snowmaking cannons, each looking a bit like a jet engine, are continually spitting streams of crystals for next year’s Olympics.
On the advice of a Finnish company called Snow Secure, the goal this season is to stockpile 500,000 cubic meters of snow into 10 shady pockets above the venues. The massive piles will be covered by insulated blankets, not unlike giant yoga mats, to protect them from the heat of summer.
Up to half of the saved snow may melt by next winter, but the site managers said they could conduct the Olympics even in the unlikely event that no natural snow falls next winter. The stockpiled snow can be shoved down the mountain with Sno-Cats or guided onto steep slides — pipes, a meter in diameter, cut in half — aimed at where the snow is most needed.
“Each venue in the mountains has its own peculiarities,” said Valeriy Lukjanov, whose job is to forecast the weather at the Sochi Games, perhaps the least appreciated task of them all. He sat in his office recently in the mountain valley where more than half of the events will take place.
“Last year, there was a meter of snow outside this window,” Lukjanov said.
One year from the start of the Sochi Games, there was none.
The places hosting the mountain competitions — not only the five Olympic sites, but also the ski resorts surrounding them — are mostly new, constructed since Russia was awarded the Games six years ago. Sochi has little experience in hosting world-class sports events, and little historical climate data is available to fully appreciate the weather possibilities.
With few exceptions, the weather stations have been in place only since 2010. What the Russians have learned since then is that the weather in the mountains above Sochi can be wildly unpredictable.
In February, World Cup snowboard cross and ski cross events were canceled because of a lack of snow, and other competitions at the Extreme Park were held amid criticism of slushy conditions.
Two years earlier, part of the European Cup Alpine skiing championships was canceled because of too much snow. Low clouds rearranged the schedule for last month’s Russian Alpine ski championships, an official test event. During the World Cup luge event in late February, it rained.
At the Olympics, unlike at test events, competitions cannot be canceled.
“During the Games, we will have more snow and we will have all the events,” Dmitry Chernyshenko, the president of the Sochi 2014 organizing committee, said in an interview last month. “We didn’t expect that the amount of snow we collected was not enough. So now we learned this lesson and paid the price.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/sports/olympics/with-weather-concerns-organizers-are-storing-snow-for-winter-olympics-in-sochi-russia.html?ref=weather&_r=0
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