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Natural snow wreaks havoc at Beijing Winter Olympics

Anthony Sharwood

You'd think the first ingredient behind a successful Winter Olympics would be natural snow, and plenty of it.

But a weekend blizzard has wreaked all kinds of havoc with the schedule of the Beijing Winter Olympics with numerous events disrupted or postponed (including the women's aerials qualification, in which Australian dual world champion Laura Peel is the gold medal favourite).

Large quantities of natural snow were never really expected in Beijing. As has been well documented, these Winter Olympics were the first Games to be planned entirely around man-made snow – a substance pretty close to the real thing which is produced by a mixture of water and compressed air blasted out into subzero temperatures.

The manmade stuff is needed because Beijing and its surrounding mountains are largely dry in winter. Bitterly cold, but dry. Indeed, Beijing sits only a couple of hundred kilometres east of the vast, arid Gobi Desert that stretches across much of northern China and Mongolia.

So the Games proceeded perfectly for the first week with stunning backdrops of snowless terrain laced with fine white ribbons of man-made snow. And then the weather turned.

As we told you last week, it was always forecast to get seriously cold in northern China this week as a Siberian airmass made its way south.

There was also the chance of snow, and so it turned out. The snow that fell over the weekend wasn't exceptionally heavy, but a few centimetres fell in the capital, while up to 10 cm fell in the mountains around Zhangjiakou, the large city near which alpine skiing and many other outdoors events are being conducted, where the average precipitation in the three winter months is less than 10 mm each month (I mm of rain = approx. 1 cm of snow).

China's official weather agency – the China Meteorological Administration – issued a "Blue Blizzard" warning, the least severe of four levels of alerts, but the prospect of heavy snow has now lifted and TV viewers can expect to see flake-free footage from the Games today.

The rest of this week should now be mostly clear with light snow a possibility for the last four days of the Games between Thursday and Sunday – but nothing heavy enough to disrupt events.

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