The snow-covered slopes near Grenoble, France, have always held a special place in Olympic history.
It was there at the 1968 Olympic Games that France’s Jean-Claude Killy swept all three Alpine skiing gold medals then available, becoming, along with American figure skater Peggy Fleming, the first Winter Olympic superstar of the TV era.
Yet when France revealed its plans to host the 2030 Winter Olympics, Grenoble wasn’t included, with organizers concerned that because of climate change, the area could no longer be counted on to have guaranteed snow.
Grenoble, however, isn’t the only Olympic icon deemed to be climate-unreliable to host future Winter Games.
Out of 93 potential Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games host sites only 52 would remain climate-reliable for the Olympics and just 22 for the Paralympics if countries continue current climate policies, according to a new study by Canada’s University of Waterloo in collaboration with University of Toronto and University of Innsbruck researchers.
“Climate change is going to change the geography of where we can hold the Winter Olympics and the Paralympics. There’s no question,” said Daniel Scott, an environment professor at Waterloo and the lead author on the study “Advancing Climate Change Resilience of the Winter Olympic-Paralympic Games.” “The only question is, how much?”
Or how soon.
Warmer-than-average temperatures have hampered snowmaking operations at Cortina d’Ampezzo, site of the Olympic women’s Alpine skiing competition as well as the sliding sport competitions, creating anxiety among athletes, Games organizers and IOC officials. Temperatures in the region in December were nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than average.
And while Scott and his colleagues labeled the 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps and the Salt Lake City Games four years later as climate-reliable, experts have expressed concern about the Utah Olympics. Park City and other Utah resorts opened several weeks behind schedule this winter and the state is in the midst of its lowest snowfall in more than 30 years.
“Hopefully, Salt Lake City (and) Utah will have a better snowpack that year than they did this year,” Scott said, referring to 2034. “The early part of this winter was a bit of an anomaly for them, and not a good one.”
Utah’s average temperature in 2025 was more than 4.3 degrees higher than the state’s 20th-century average, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“I don’t think we’re going to see a Winter Olympic Games in Utah in 2034,” Rocky Anderson, Salt Lake City’s mayor during the 2002 Olympic Games, told Yale Climate Connections, an initiative of the Yale Center for Environmental Communication.
“By the time the Winter Games are staged in Utah, the global winter sports landscape will already reflect the impacts of a warming climate,” said Robert Steiger, a University of Innsbruck professor who contributed to the Waterloo study.
“Climate change is already reshaping the international competition calendar for winter sports,” Steiger continued. “The cancellation of a significant number of FIS World Cup events in recent seasons due to poor snow conditions illustrates that this is no longer a future risk, but a present reality.”
FIS, skiing and snowboarding’s international governing body, canceled seven of its first eight World Cup downhill skiing and snowboarding competitions in the 2022-23 season because of unsafe conditions due to a lack of snow. Twenty-six World Cup events were canceled the following season. Poor conditions due to warmer temperatures were blamed for an increase in injuries and crashes during the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.
“I think with new leadership and pressure from athletes, FIS has finally come to terms with the new realities of climate change and understands they have to change the way they do business,” Scott said. “Traditional schedules of where and when iconic races are held in the competition schedule will have to change, just as the geography of where the Winter Olympics is held has to change. They are in the early stages of working that out, and hopefully they can make strategic changes that maintain the number of competitions but shift some of the more vulnerable early-season races to more climate-reliable locations.”
Madeleine Orr, a sports ecology professor at the University of Toronto and a co-author on the study, said the climate crisis will have an impact on winter sports beyond the Olympic Games and World Cup circuit.
“On a global level, I expect we’ll start to see declines in participation rates for snow sports as there are fewer opportunities to ski with shorter seasons,” Orr said. “If fewer people are skiing, resorts will have to increase ticket prices for the people who do ski in order to make ends meet. And that will kick off a cycle of decline: fewer participants, higher costs, which lead to even fewer participants because it’s cost-prohibitive to be on the mountain … and the cycle continues. All this to say, I expect we’ll see snow sports declining over the next few decades due to the financial crunch that climate change presents. Not all mountains will feel it the same way, and resorts at smaller altitudes and with less snowmaking capacity will feel it faster, but these shifts are imminent.”
A 2024 study by Scott and Co. and commissioned by the IOC of winter sport locations with the infrastructure to host the Olympics found that, in addition to Grenoble, previous Winter Olympic sites Sochi, Russia, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, and Chamonix, France, would not have enough snowfall by 2050 to be considered climate-reliable to host the Games.Other previous Olympic hosts Vancouver-Whistler, Tahoe, California, Oslo and Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Oslo, were deemed “climatically risky.”
“With current leadership, I’m not confident we’ll see governments change course fast enough to keep winter sports viable for the long-term,” Orr said. “Because to do that, we’d need to see a massive curb in emissions across all sectors, and we’re seeing small shifts, but so long as consumption patterns in the Global North remain high and energy sources continue to be unsustainable, the small shifts won’t be enough. I’d love to be wrong about that.”
The early results of the research that would make up the 2024 study were such a red flag for the IOC that it delayed its decision on selecting a host for the 2030 Games from September 2023 to July 2024.
“Climate change has become one of the central strategic challenges for the International Olympic Committee with regard to the future of the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games,” Steiger said. “This is why the IOC has commissioned the 2024 study where we analyzed 93 potential host locations. The IOC also postponed the decision for the host selection for the 2030 Games by one year, mentioning that they wanted to have more information regarding climate impacts. At that time, our study was not yet finished.”
“The Winter Games have to adapt,” said Christophe Dubi, the IOC’s Olympic Games executive director.
Karl Stoss, chairman of the IOC’s Future Host Commission, has raised the possibility of moving Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games each up a month on the calendar–the Olympics to January, the Paralympics to February.
“We have to look at how we can change the format for the future Winter Olympic and Summer Olympic Games,” Stoss said.
The Milano Cortina and the 2030 Olympics in the French Alps reflect a change in format and the IOC’s move away from centralized Games, as well as the organization’s acknowledgement of climate change and emphasis on using existing facilities.
This month’s Olympic Games will be contested in four competition clusters stretching 8,495 square miles across Italy from Milan in the west in the shadow of the Alps, to Cortina, the queen of the Dolomites, near the Austrian border.
The 2030 Games will have at least four clusters from Nice on the French Riviera up into the Alps. The Utah Games will be more compact, relying largely on existing venues used in the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City and its suburbs, and Park City, which is 30 miles away.
Scott and others also suggest the IOC and International Paralympic Committee need to reconsider a policy of cities hosting both the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
“We have to prioritize solutions to the much greater risk facing the Paralympics and explore ways that the One Bid, One City partnership can survive in an era of climate change,” Scott said.
A lack of snow has been an issue for the Winter Olympics for decades. The Italian army transported truckloads of snow into Cortina to salvage the 1956 Games. More truckloads of snow were needed for the 2010 Vancouver-Whistler Olympics.
A person works at a snow making machine on a hill overlooking cross-country skiing practice before the 2022 Winter Olympics, Feb. 2, 2022, in Zhangjiakou, China. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila, File)But Olympic hosts and the skiing industry are increasingly on snow farming and snowmaking machines that convert water into snow.
The 2022 Olympics in Beijing were the first Games where nearly 100 percent of snow used in competition was man made. China used an estimated 49 million gallons of water to produce 1.2 million cubic meters of artificial snow, sparking international criticism.
The Milano Cortina Olympics will use approximately 250 million gallons of water to make enough artificial snow to meet the Games’ needs. Much of that water has come from newly constructed high elevations like Livigno Snow Park, which has a 53-million gallon basin. The basin has produced more than 600,000 cubic meters of snow since December for freestyle and snowboard events.
“There have been criticisms of the reliance on snowmaking in Beijing and other recent Games, but not employing it is no more an option than is moving hockey, figure skating, and curling back outside,” Scott said. “Abandoning snowmaking would result in a major increase in unfair and unsafe conditions for athletes, canceled competitions, and eventually a Winter Games without any snow sports.”
Of the 93 locations identified by the IOC as having the facilities and infrastructure to host the Olympics or Paralympics in 2050 only four cities — Niseko, Japan; Terskol, Russia; and Val d’Isère and Courchevel in France — could host the Games without snowmaking, according to the Waterloo study.
“It’s time to explore everything and anything,” IOC president Kirsty Coventry said. “It’s impacting us as a group, and as a sports movement together and we have to have these conversations on how we forsee things in the future and how are we going to adapt the historical timing of things to ensure that we can still hold our sports events around the world.”
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