Athletes train at the national cross-country skiing center in Zhangjiakou, China, on Jan. 31, 2022, a day after a light snow dusted the nearby hills. The environmentally unfriendly secret of winter sports is that many competitions take place on artificial snow, and China’s water-scarce capital had to go to enormous lengths to make enough of it. (Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times)
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.
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