When Will the Last Winter Olympics Be Held?

The International Olympic Committee awarded the 2030 Winter Olympics to the French Alps, and the 2034 Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City, Utah, on Wednesday. In both cases, the winner was the only bidder remaining.

The French Alps Olympics will have the shortest time between award and the event of any in recent history; notably, though president Emmanuel Macron said there is a financial guarantee in place, the 2030 games still must be approved by the next prime minister. Meanwhile, Salt Lake City makes a lot of sense for a variety of practical reasons, most notably that they claim to not need any new construction for a games set to be held 32 years since the city’s first hosting opportunity in 2002. All the existing venues are still usable, and all are within about an hour’s drive of the Olympic Village at the University of Utah.

Both places also, for the moment, still have enough snow.

Siting the Winter Olympics has become an enormous challenge as the world warms. Mixed with dropping enthusiasm globally to host what many see as disruptive multi-billion-dollar boondoggles — winter or summer versions — the melting snow and ice and disappearing glaciers are making a suitable spot hard to find. The IOC is well aware of this; in recent years it has heard reports from its Future Host Commission on the dire state of winter sports around the world, and in particular in places that have previously hosted the games.

Among the proposals on the table for the IOC: maintain a small rotation of suitable locations, in order to both cut down on costs and avoid having to go back to the Vancouvers or Sapporos that may be starting to see the ice melt from their Olympic capabilities. That rotation would likely include Salt Lake City, with its reasonably high altitude and close-by still-snowy mountains. Along with the French Alps, other likely recurring hosts include Switzerland and Sweden.

Another proposal would be to set a temperature threshold for winter hosting duties. Locations would need to show average minimum temperatures below freezing for any venue where snow-based competition takes place, over a ten-year period. That will get harder and harder as time goes on.

“We have to think of the constraints of the climate change,” said Austrian IOC member Karl Stoss, earlier this year. “This will be a great challenge for us, which partner for the future will be reliable to organize Winter Games.”

Studies have borne out the idea that Winter Olympic hosts are now spread very thin and will get much thinner. In 2022, researchers at the University of Waterloo surveyed hundreds of Olympic athletes and coaches, and based on their input, found that the frequency of “unfair-unsafe” winter conditions have increased dramatically across 21 host locations over 50 years. If the world gets its act together and matches its emissions to the goals of the Paris Agreement, the number of reasonable locations will remain at about eight or nine through this century.

If it doesn’t, and emissions remain on the trajectories of the last two decades?

The number of good host sites drops to one.

There will always be snow and ice on some mountain, somewhere, of course. (Probably.) But the Olympics are a big, messy affair, with a lot of requirements, and heading up into the upper reaches of the Himalayas is pretty much off the table. So it is worth wondering: when will the last Winter Olympics take place?

Or, more reasonably, when will we see the last Olympics that looks a lot like what has come before? After all, a lot of the Games take place indoors; a team in Florida just won the Stanley Cup, pretty sure the hockey and figure skating and so on can happen regardless. But with host cities dropping out of the running, with the IOC pondering ideas like shrinking the list of hosts into the low single digits, with glaciers disappearing around the world at a genuinely distressing speed… how long can the Winter Olympics as we know it continue?