When audience music in to the 2026 Iciness Olympics, they’ll see pristine, white slopes, groomed tracks and athletes racing over snow-covered landscapes, thank you partly to a hurricane that blanketed the mountain venues of the Italian Alps with contemporary powder simply in time.
However at decrease elevations, the place cross-country and different occasions are held, athletes and organizers were contending with rain; skinny, from time to time slushy snow; and icy, machine-made surfaces.
“Most of our races are on machine-made snow,” 2026 U.S. Olympic crew cross-country skier Rosie Brennan instructed us forward of the Video games. “TV production is great at making it look like we are in wintry, snowy places, but this year has been particularly bad.”
Gadget-made snow increasingly more makes the Iciness Video games imaginable. It’s additionally slicker to race and tougher to fall on. Right here, Olympic skier Ben Ogden of the U.S. competes all the way through the dash of the FIS Go-Nation International Cup Excursion de Ski in Toblach, Italy, on Dec. 28, 2024.
Federica Vanzetta/NordicFocus/Getty Pictures
As scientists who learn about mountain snow, water sources and the human affect of warming winters, we see wintry weather’s adjustments via knowledge: emerging temperatures, shrinking snowpack, shorter snow seasons.
Olympic athletes revel in converting wintry weather prerequisites for my part, in tactics the general public and scientists hardly do. Loss of blizzard and extra widespread rain have an effect on when and the place they are able to teach, how they teach and the way unhealthy the terrain can grow to be.
We talked with Brennan and cross-country skiers Ben Ogden and Jack Younger as they have been getting ready for the 2026 Iciness Video games. Their reviews mirror what many athletes describe: a recreation increasingly more outlined now not via the variety of herbal wintry weather however via the reliability of industrialized snowmaking.
What the cameras don’t display
Snowmaking era makes it imaginable to create halfpipes for freestyle skiing and snowboarding competitions. It additionally lets in for races when herbal snow is scarce – the 2022 Iciness Olympics in Beijing relied completely on machine-made snow for lots of races.
Alternatively, machine-made snow creates an excessively other floor than herbal snow, converting the race.
Athletes teach on the ski leaping enviornment previous to the Open Italian Championship in Predazzo, a 2026 Iciness Olympics venue, on Dec. 23, 2025.
Stefano Rellandini/AFP by means of Getty Pictures
In clouds, every distinctive snowflake form is made up our minds via the temperature and humidity. As soon as shaped, the enduring celebrity form starts to slowly erode as its crystals grow to be rounded spheres. On this approach, herbal snow supplies a number of textures and depths: cushy powder after a hurricane, company or brittle snow in chilly climate, and slushy, rainy snow all the way through rain or soften occasions.
Gadget-made snow varies much less in texture or high quality. It starts and ends its lifestyles as an ice pellet surrounded via a skinny movie of liquid water. That makes it slower to switch, more uncomplicated to form, and, as soon as frozen, it hardens in position.
‘They’re quicker, icier and lift extra chance’
When synthetic snow is being made, the sound is piercing – a high-pitched hiss roars from the pressurized nozzles of snow weapons. Those weapons spew water combined with compressed air, and it freezes upon touch with the chilly air outdoor, growing small, dense ice debris. The drops sting uncovered pores and skin, as considered one of us, Agnes Macy, is aware of smartly as a former aggressive skier.
Snow machines then push out synthetic snow onto the racecourse. Steadily, the paths are the one ribbons of snow in sight – a white strip surrounded via brown dust and lifeless grass.
The encompassing panorama used to be most commonly snow-free when Rosie Brennan competed within the person dash at an FIS Go-Nation International Cup tournament in Drammen, Norway, on March 3, 2022.
Federico Modica/NordicFocus/Getty Pictures
“Courses built for natural snow feel completely different when covered in man-made snow,” Brennan, 37, mentioned. “They’re faster, icier, and carry more risk than anyone might imagine for cross-country skiing.”
There’s not anything relatively like snowboarding on contemporary snow. After a hurricane brings a blanket of sunshine, fluffy powder, it will probably nearly really feel as despite the fact that you’re floating. The snow is forgiving.
On synthetic snow, skiers lift extra velocity into downhill runs. Downhill racers would possibly relish the rate, however cross-country skis don’t have steel edges like downhill skis do, so step-turning or skidding round speedy, icy corners could make an athlete really feel out of regulate. It “requires a different style of skiing, skill sets and strengths than I grew up learning,” Brennan mentioned.
How athletes adapt, with lend a hand from science
Athletes should modify their method and get ready their skis another way, relying at the snow prerequisites.
At elite ranges, that is science. Snow crystal morphology, temperature, ski base subject material and construction, ski stiffness, skier method and environmental prerequisites all have interaction to decide an athlete’s velocity.
How snow paperwork. NBC Information Be informed.
Sooner than cross-country, or Nordic, races, ski technicians examine more than one ski pairs ready with other base surfaces and waxes. They evaluation how briefly every ski glides and the way lengthy it maintains that drift – characteristics that rely at the friction between the ski and the snow.
In comparison to herbal snow, machine-made snow most often supplies a harder and longer-lasting floor. In cross-country racing, that permits for extra environment friendly and more potent pushes with out skis or poles sinking deep into snow. Moreover, enhancements within the machines used to groom snow now supply tougher and extra homogeneous surfaces that allow quicker snowboarding.
Russia’s Alexander Terentev, proper, and Czech Republic’s Michal Novak crash all the way through a males’s cross-country dash quarterfinal race on the FIS Nordic International Ski Championships in Oberstdorf, Germany, on Feb. 25, 2021.
AP Picture/Matthias Schrader
Whilst speedy snowboarding is the function, ski crashes also are the commonest purpose of damage within the Iciness Olympics. With machine-made snow, ski bounce competition and any individual who falls could also be touchdown on a tougher floor, which is able to build up the chance of damage.
Why winters are converting
Climate can all the time deal surprises, however long-term local weather developments are transferring what will also be anticipated of a normal wintry weather.
Within the Alps, air temperature has greater via about 3.6 levels Fahrenheit (2 levels Celsius) because the overdue 1800s, prior to emerging fossil gasoline use started expanding the degrees of greenhouse gases trapping warmth within the environment. Globally, 2025 used to be the third-warmest yr on document, following 2024 and 2023.
For mountain areas, those hotter prerequisites have penalties. Snow melts previous and extra ceaselessly in midwinter, particularly all the way through heat spells that was once uncommon.
Midwinter snowmelt occasions are happening extra incessantly at upper elevations and previous within the season throughout many mountain levels of western North The usa. On the identical time, the snow line – the elevation the place precipitation shifts from snow to rain – is shifting upslope.
Warming in excessive mountain environments could also be inflicting the edge the place rain turns to snow to upward push via tens of meters in line with decade in some areas. This implies storms that when blanketed complete valleys in snow now would possibly ship snow most effective to higher slopes, with rain falling under.
Taking sharp corners on icy surfaces isn’t simple on cross-country skis. Right here, U.S. Olympic skier Jack Younger competes within the person dash finals of the FIS Go-Nation International Cup Oberhof on Jan. 17, 2026, in Oberhof, Germany.
Leo Authamayou/NordicFocus/Getty Pictures
In combination, those adjustments imply that many wintry weather storms produce much less snow, over much less house, and for shorter intervals than they did a technology in the past.
Coaching venues
The converting wintry weather panorama has additionally reworked how athletes teach. Conventional coaching venues, corresponding to glaciers as soon as used for summer time snowboarding, have grow to be unreliable. In August 2025, the Hintertux Glacier – the one year-round coaching heart running in Austria – introduced its first brief closure.
“It’s been increasingly hard to make plans for locations to train between races,” Brennan mentioned. “Snow reliability isn’t great in many places. We often rely on going to higher elevations for a better chance of snow.”
Biathlon athletes follow their recreation on wheels on the Loop One Pageant in Munich’s Olympic Park on Oct. 19, 2025.
Sven Hoppe/image alliance by means of Getty Pictures
Upper-elevation coaching can lend a hand, nevertheless it concentrates athletes in fewer puts, reduces get entry to for more youthful skiers because of the remoteness and raises prices for nationwide groups. A few of these glaciers – like Canada’s Haig Glacier or Alaska’s Eagle Glacier – are out there most effective via helicopter. When skiers can’t get to snow, dryland coaching on rollerskis is without doubt one of the most effective choices.
Iciness athletes see the local weather converting
As a result of wintry weather is their place of business, athletes incessantly realize refined adjustments prior to the ones adjustments display up in long-term statistics.
Even athletes of their previous 20s, like Younger, mentioned they have got spotted the fast enlargement of snowmaking infrastructure at many racing venues in recent times. Snowmaking calls for huge quantities of power and water. It is usually a transparent signal that organizers see winters changing into much less unswerving.
Iciness athletes like Canadian Dahria Beatty are seeing their atmosphere exchange as temperatures upward push.
Athletes additionally witness how communities are affected when deficient snow prerequisites imply fewer guests. “In the Alps, when conditions are bad, it is obvious how much it affects the communities,” Ogden, 25, mentioned. “Their tourism-based livelihoods are so often negatively affected, and their quality of life changes.”
Many wintry weather athletes are talking publicly about their considerations. Teams corresponding to Give protection to Our Winters, based via skilled snowboarder Jeremy Jones, paintings to advance insurance policies that give protection to outside puts for long term generations.
A wintry glance, however an unsure long term
For athletes on the 2026 Olympics, the variety inside the Olympic area – snow at upper elevations, rain at decrease ones – displays a broader reality: The stableness of wintry weather is diminishing.
Athletes know this higher than any individual. They race in it. They teach in it. They rely on it.
The Iciness Video games will pass in this yr. The snow will glance just right on tv. However on the identical time, wintry weather is converting.
