BarcelonaJust as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) remains uncertain as to where the 2030 Winter Olympics will be, the snow sports industry is following with a mixture of disbelief and interest the statements of Saudi government spokesmen Saudi, which wants to enter this field strongly despite the fact that the country does not have a ski slope right now. In a land where it very occasionally snows on the mountaintops and has the occasional cold night in the desert, Riyadh’s government believes that new technology and a commitment to artificial snow can allow them to host the Asian Winter Games of the year 2029. And if they get away with it, consider aspiring to bring the Winter Olympics to an Arab country for the first time.
The Saudi government, criticized for its lack of respect for human rights and its hermeticism, has joined the policy of its regional rivals, such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, to use sport to improve its image and strengthen its role within international politics. The turnaround of the past five years, led by Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has seen the Saudis host F1 races, aspire to host a host of tournaments and cause a crisis within the golf world by creating a second professional circuit that it attracts the best players by the bucketload, not forgetting the fact that it brings home the Spanish Super Cup of football. Now, the Saudis have set their sights on winter sports. In fact, it is a region without any kind of tradition in sports of this type. The Saudis had never sent an athlete to a Winter Olympic date until these last games in Beijing, when skier Fayik Abdi took part in the supergiant using his skiing mastery after years living in Europe.
The Saudi candidacy is to organize the 2029 Asian Winter Games, a competition that has not been able to be organized in a stable way since it was first held in 1986 in Sapporo (Japan), a city that would repeat as its headquarters the second edition, in 1990. Then it was held in Harbin (China) in 1996, in Gangwon (South Korea) in 1999, in Aomori (Japan) in 2003, in Changchun (China) in 2007, in Astana (Kazakhstan ) in 2011 and again in Sapporo in 2017. This is the winter version of the Asian Summer Games, the biggest event that copies the Summer Olympics program but only for Asian states. In the winter version, the sports practiced are alpine skiing, Nordic skiing, biathlon, ski jumping, curling, figure skating, speed skating, ice hockey, snowboarding and ‘ski freestyle. For now, there is no other scheduled Asian Winter Games until 2029, the year the Saudis want to host them. The Asian Olympic Committee will decide whether to accept it at a congress this October.
The Saudis want to organize this meeting in the Tabuk mountain area, near the border with Jordan and the Red Sea, a natural area with peaks of more than 3,000 meters where it snows from time to time, but never hard enough to be able have a ski slope. It would therefore be necessary for the snow to be artificial. “Every time an event like the Games is organized in a place where everything has to be artificial snow it’s a sign that it’s being held in an area that’s not sustainable,” defends ecology expert Madeleine Orr, from Loughborough University . The first time that artificial snow was used in a Winter Olympics was in Lake Placid, the United States, in 1980. At the last games in China this year, artificial snow was already 100 %. “This requires the use of very large reserves of water,” complains Orr, while the International Olympic Committee defends its use despite some athletes complaining that artificial snow is slightly more dangerous than natural in the time to compete because she is faster. According to a study by Orr, climate change would mean that of all the cities that have so far hosted a Winter Olympics, only one, Sapporo, could have the right conditions to host a Games with only natural snow in 2030 .
The new frontier for winter sports, if they want to continue to grow, is artificial snow, which opens the door to areas where it would previously be unthinkable to compete, such as the Arabian Peninsula. “All the energies would be renewable. It would be a unique experience, where the luggage would be carried using drones, with the possibility of visiting the area using virtual reality and with all kinds of facilities”, Philip Gullett, chosen by to be the future director of the ski resort of Trojena, as a project would be called that would include an Olympic village, hotels, a nature reserve, a yoga center and the creation of an artificial lake of natural water.
The Saudi project, in fact, is linked to one of the big bets of its government, Neom, a macro-city that wants to be completed before 2030 on the coast of the Red Sea and that would have its own laws in order to attract western professionals to live and work there. A futuristic city that could cost up to 500 billion dollars. The Neom project aims to occupy a large territory where there would be no cars, with a high-speed train system that would connect the inhabited centers, one of which a city where more than nine million people would live and which would be at the same time a only large building in a straight line: a macro-construction 170 kilometers long that would not be finished until 2070. About this futuristic project it has been said that a kind of artificial moon would be created, which generates a lot of debate among experts. The area of Tabuk, close to Neom, would allow the future citizens of the city an escape to go skiing.
The candidacy of the Pyrenees
This candidacy, if it goes ahead, would also alter the scenario for future Winter Olympic Games candidacies, since the IOC is committed to reformulating the model of winter appointments to be able to hold them in a sustainable way, but also opening up to new scenarios. A bet that generates debates among experts, especially for the use of artificial snow and the resources that would need to be used, which also affects the Pyrenees, where the Games have never been held and without artificial snow the ski slopes could not have the life they have now. The bid to bring the Games to the Pyrenees in 2030, however, ran into a lack of political agreement between Catalonia and Aragon. And right now it seems unlikely that in 2030 or 2034 the IOC will bet on this region.