The Nice Olympic lie: untold story of Winter Games’ large environmental influence | Winter Olympics 2026

On the foothills of the mountains, by the banks of the river in Cortina, there was a forest. It was stuffed with tall larch timber. Arborists mentioned the oldest of them had been there for 150 years and dendrologists that it was distinctive as a result of it was uncommon to discover a monocultural forest rising at such a low altitude within the southern Alps.

The locals knew principally it was the place the place the outdated wood bobsleigh run was, the place you went in your walks in summer season or autumn, or whenever you wished to play tennis on the small courts constructed close to the underside. They referred to as it the Bosco di Ronco and it isn’t there any extra.

Sustainability is the good lie of those Games. It was written all by way of the bid doc and the International Olympic Committee has slapped it throughout all method of promotional literature.

“For the IOC, for sport in general, sustainability is a priority,” mentioned the chief director of the Olympic Games, Christophe Dubi. If you need extra particulars, the IOC may give you any amount of information about its low carbon transport plan and the way it’s only utilizing recyclable cutlery and linen tablecloths. It will let you know over and once more that 85% of the venues getting used at this Olympics already existed or are non permanent.

What it gained’t say is the overwhelming majority of these current venues wanted to be demolished and rebuilt with a lot bigger footprints; that, for instance, they determined to gouge a brand new snowpark out of a mountain in Livigno despite the fact that they already had one at Trepalle within the adjoining valley. Or that in Predazzo the ski jumps had been rebuilt from scratch a number of hundred metres throughout from the present ones. Or to make room for his or her new bobsleigh observe they needed to reduce down the Bosco di Ronco, in order that, if you happen to go there now, all you see is 2km of metal and concrete.

It gained’t say, both, that the local weather disaster has induced the common February temperatures in Cortina to rise by 3.6C because the Olympics had been final in Italy, 20 years in the past, that the common February snow depth has fallen by 15cm prior to now 50 years and that they needed to construct 4 excessive altitude reservoirs to offer the two.3m cubic metres of synthetic snow they should fluff up the ski runs to the required depth of 1.5m. Or that a lot of the water getting used to fill these reservoirs must be pumped all the way in which up the mountains after being extracted from the native rivers, that are already in drought for giant components of the 12 months.

It most likely gained’t point out that out of the entire spend on the 98 building initiatives, 13% went on issues important to the staging of the Games and that the remaining 87% is on infrastructure works – roads, rails, automotive parks – most of which aren’t as a result of be constructed till the Olympics is over. Or that the Italian authorities waived the necessity for any Environmental Impact Assessment work to be carried out on 60% of those initiatives. Or that every one that is taking place in the midst of a Unesco world heritage website and one of the fragile ecosystems on the planet.

“The Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games were presented as ‘the Olympics of sustainability’,” says World Wildlife Fund Italia, “but this is not the case.”

It didn’t must be like this. WWF Italia was one in all a bunch of environmental organisations concerned in discussions with the Italian Olympic Committee to work out what a extra sustainable Games would seem like. It felt compelled to stroll away from them when it grew to become clear the organisers had been treating it as window dressing.

“In reality,” the WWF mentioned, “there has been no real discussion, prompting the associations themselves to abandon the roundtable a year before the start of the Olympic Games.”

When they reduce down the Bosco di Ronco, the Venetian cellist Mario Brunello got here and performed Camille Saint-Saëns’s The Swan among the fallen boughs. Luigi Casanova, a former forest ranger who’s now a writer and activist, was there with him.

“You have to remember that in all these situations, the Italian environmental movement proposed alternative solutions,” Casanova says. “Less environmentally impactful, less costly, safe and socially beneficial to communities. The environmental and landscape impact of the Olympics will be paid for by those who follow us.”

Casanova, who has written two important books on the environmental influence of the Olympics, describes the destruction of the forest as “the most striking example of the violence of these Olympics”, then says: “We have other Olympic sacrileges to list: the Socrepes cable car in Cortina, built on a moving landslide, the Olympic village in Cortina, 15 hectares [37 acres] of natural land destroyed for a village that will be dismantled, the village of Predazzo built at the confluence of two alluvial streams; the slopes of Bormio and Livigno, upgraded with the destruction of thousands of trees.”

Not everybody agrees with him. Local enterprise homeowners say they don’t miss the forest and would slightly have the enterprise the bobsleigh observe will usher in. The Winter Olympics have been held in Italy twice earlier than, in 1956 and 2006, a bob observe was constructed each occasions and each fell into disuse.

Their opinions reveal some the strain right here, between the necessity to present infrastructure that can help the native financial system even whereas the development of that infrastructure undermines the viability of the neighborhood.

Carmen de Jong, professor of hydrology on the University of Strasbourg, has been working a multi-year research on the environmental influence of the Winter Games, concentrating particularly on the essential difficulty of the water provide. It is simple to neglect from watching the beautiful footage on TV that these Games are usually not being held on actual snow. It has been made out of water taken from springs, torrents, valley rivers, dam reservoirs, consuming water networks, even groundwater that must be pumped uphill and cooled earlier than use.

“Four new reservoirs ‘had to be constructed’ to supply vast amounts of snow for only a few days of competition for the Olympic ski runs, half-pipe, and snow park,” she says. “In a frantic attempt to catch up the delay in reservoir construction, the organisers started pumping as much water as their infrastructure allowed from the already drought-stricken alpine rivers.”

According to De Jong’s evaluation, they used non permanent derogations to take three and 5 occasions the permitted water portions from the Spöl river in Livigno and Boite river in Cortina, “and almost completely dried them up, resulting in fish death and acute pollution.

“Water reservoirs for creating artificial snow over ski runs in alpine ski resorts or Olympic venues are a clear sign of water scarcity and a cry for help in times of climate change.”

Spreading the Games throughout such an unlimited space has solely multiplied the impact they’re having on the setting already beneath immense stress. The Olympic crucial that each Games must be newer, larger and higher than the one earlier than makes the declare that this can be a “sustainable Games” an insult to everybody taking part in and watching.