- The Beijing
Winter Olympics has been wholly reliant on artificial snow for its alpine event. - So when a storm hit some regions over the weekend, chaos ensued.
The Beijing Winter Olympics has become notorious for being wholly reliant on artificial snow.
Although the city of Beijing and the surrounding areas experience extreme cold in winter, snow is a rarity, with less than an inch falling on average in February, meaning snow machines have instead filled Beijing's arid mountainsides for the world's top athletes.
On Sunday, however, a lack of snow was not a problem, with some areas, including the venues at Zhangjiakou and Yanqing — around 100 miles and 45 miles from Beijing respectively — experiencing double the monthly expected snowfall in just a few hours.
The downfall caused chaos, resulting in a number of events being postponed or delayed as organizers scrambled to deal with the unexpected snow.
Eileen Gu's qualifying run in the freeski slopestyle was postponed, with organizers saying, according to The Guardian, that the storm had left too much loose snow on the freestyle course which could be dangerous for athletes.
Gu went on to finish third in the reorganized qualifying event on Monday, rewarding herself with a sandwich.
Other impacted events included the men's freeski slopestyle qualification, which was moved to Tuesday, with the finals on Wednesday.
In the alpine skiing, the second run of the men's giant slalom was delayed by the snowfall and only went ahead after several hours of maintenance on the track.
A training run for the women's downhill was also cancelled.
There were still plenty of events that went ahead as planned despite the snow, including the men's 4x10km cross-country relay.
The Russian Olympics Committee (ROC) team won the race with a time of 1:54:50 – which was over 20 minutes slower than the equivalent race at the 2018 games in Pyeongchang, thanks in large part to the snow.
When delayed second run of the men's giant slalom finally went ahead, 33 of the 87 starters were unable to finish.
Norway's Henrik Kristoffersen, who finished fourth in the opening run, said of the conditions at the National Alpine Skiing Centre in Yanqing: "The snow is a little uneven, so it's quite aggressive in spots, a little slick. I think it was difficult for everyone."
Jamaica's Benjamin Alexander finished 46th and said after one of his runs: "Frickin' hell, that was hard."
Beijing's reliance on artificial snow for the games has come under heavy criticism from environmentalists.
TechnoAlpin, the company China hired for snow-making, told Insider it expected the games would require about 343 million gallons of water for snow, which is the equivalent to a day's worth of drinking water for nearly 900 million people.
Professor Carmen de Jong, a geographer at the University of Strasbourg, called the games the "most unsustainable Winter Olympics ever held."
Madeleine Orr, a sport ecologist at Loughborough University London, told Insider: "The massive reliance on water for these games was an inevitability once the games were awarded to Beijing because the region doesn't get nearly enough natural snow to accommodate snow-based competitions.
"So going to Beijing, the International Olympic Committee and all the event organizers knew what they were getting into."