The Winter Games are celebrating a century with their future conditioned by the climate crisis

The Winter Olympic Gameswho were born without knowing who they are, will be one hundred years old this Thursday whose future is conditioned by climate crisiswhich, according to the IOC itself, will reduce to ten the number of countries able to organize snow events from 2040.

The charming town of Chamonix, at the foot of Mont Blanc, hosted the International Winter Sports Week from January 25 to February 5, 1924, which was integrated into the program of the Paris Summer Games. Two years later, those competitions would be known as the first White Games in history.

Almost a hundred years later, the Games of Beijing 2022, the last ones held, were held entirely on artificial snow and in a large city far from the mountains, but with very good stadiums for ice competitions.

The next two editions, 2026 and 2030, will be held in the same mountain range, of Los Alps (in Italy and France, respectively), one of the few that guarantees snow on sufficient slopes with the technical requirements demanded by the Olympic events.

One in 2034 will enter Salt Lake City (USA), where they had already been held in 2002, which seemed to condemn the Games to the rotation of a small group of places that already had the facilities and experience. There are economic and environmental reasons for this.

“We look to the past with pride and to the future with confidence,” the IOC’s executive director for the Olympic Games, the Swiss, said last week. Christophe Dubewho commented on the anniversary of Chamonix 1924. But the president of the organization, the German Thomas Bach, said in October that the climate crisis will have “a dramatic effect” on the Winter Games.

Pos reason of Maintenance, the IOC only grants the Games venue to countries that already have all the facilities available or can solve their deficiencies with removable facilities. Currently, only 15, most of them in Europe, meet these conditions.

“By 2040, ‘tomorrow’ in Olympic terms, two of these fifteen will no longer have the required reliability for the Games to be held in February and five will not have it for the Paralympics to be held in March. This means that in 2040 only ten NOCs (national committees) will be able to host the Games’ snow sports,” Bach said.

No one thought of these problems in 1924, when 260 athletes from 16 countries traveled to Chamonix to compete in 16 events. sports then Ice Hockeyfigure skating, curling, speed skating, bobsleigh, jumping, cross-country skiing, Nordic combined and… military patrol.

According to IOC archives, the competitions were a success and sold out 10,004 tickets.

an american, Jewtraw Shawls, was the first champion to win the 500 m speed skating. But a Finn, Clas Thunberg, also a sprinter, became the star of the Games, winning five medals, three of them gold.

The hockey team Canada He has already shown signs of success and became the champion with 122 goals for and three matches. She would eventually win eight golds in the men’s tournament, as well as five of the seven played since the women’s tournament was added to the program in 1998.

Only 13 women competed in Chamonix, all in figure skating. The Austrian won Hema Planck-Szabo. Spaniard Lilí Álvarez could have been among the participants, but she missed the Games due to injury. Seven months later, along with Rosa Torras, she would become the first Spanish Olympian to compete in the tennis tournament of the Summer Games.

Norway won the final medal table, with 17 podiums. There was also a trend from the start, as the Norwegians topped the Games’ historic table, ahead of the United States, Germany and the Soviet Union.

A big birthday cake for all the inhabitants of Chamonix will allow them to celebrate the anniversary. Various sports competitions and exhibitions and conferences will take place in the coming weeks. On June 23, Olympic Day, the Olympic flame of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 will pass through town.

That first edition has a continuation of those of St. Moritz 1928, Lake Placid 1928 and Garmisch-Partenkirchen 1936, before World War II forced the cancellation of the 1940 and 1944 editions.

Between 1948 and 1992 the Winter Games They will continue to be held in the same year as the Summer Games. Since then, they have met. In 1976 the Winter Paralympic Games were born.

The seed planted in 1924 at the foot of the Alps is now a giant tree: around 3,000 athletes participated in the Games, there were more than a hundred medal events and more than ninety countries participated. The climate crisis It has a key to the future, which includes taking advantage of the headquarters already built and adapting the map of the facilities to what the environmental conditions allow.