How climate change is threatening the future of winter sport

This is the first of a two-part series examining how climate change is threatening the future of winter sport. On Thursday, you can read about a call to action from athletes, and what decision-makers in Canada and beyond are doing to address the issue.

For more than two decades, young skiers and snowboarders have spent summers on Whistler Blackcomb's Horstman Glacier, training with some of Canada’s top athletes on snow.

Momentum Camps have been where Olympic dreams were born and lifelong love for sport bloomed. A young moguls skier could learn the ropes from Mikaël Kingsbury, the man they call the King of Moguls.

The list of former campers who’ve gone on to reach the highest level in their sport is a long one: from Alex Bilodeau, a two-time Olympic gold medallist in moguls, to snowboarder Cassie Sharpe, who owns both Olympic gold and silver, to Jennifer Heil, an Olympic gold medallist who will be Canada’s chef de mission at the upcoming Winter Olympics in Italy, just to name a few.

Beyond creating champions, the goal was to expose kids to mentors who model healthy lifestyles, according to John Smart, the two-time Olympian and 13-time World Cup medallist in freestyle skiing who created Momentum Camps after returning from the 1992 Olympic Games.

“There [are] so many thousands of kids that came through the program, and truly went on to be superstars and successes,” Smart said.

But with the glacier melting fast, summer skiing and snowboarding on Horstman Glacier disappeared in the summer of 2024, when the mountain resort deemed it wasn’t safe to operate during the warmer months. Gone are the camps that mixed eager kids with elite athletes.

It also left some of the top athletes with nowhere to train in Canada during the summer. Instead, they often have to look to Europe, a shift that’s cost more money and disrupted athletes’ lives.

The end of summer skiing was a stark reminder of the existential threat looming over winter sports: the world is warming, and fast.

“You can't help but think about it daily, particularly in the context of what we're talking about, where a major training centre has been impacted,” said Peter Judge, CEO of Freestyle Ski Canada.

A 2024 study commissioned by the International Olympic Committee found the number of locations with the weather to host the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games is shrinking rapidly. It found just half of the 21 previous Olympic host cities would be suitable to host by the 2050s, due to a warming planet.

It’s a reality the ski and snowboard world is already seeing up close, with more and more competitions cancelled or scaled down for athletes’ safety.

“We're seeing more and more where the reliability of early season events sits very tenuously,” Judge said. “Before, there was never a question about December events happening, and now it becomes a question every year as to whether they'll happen.”

The larger issue of our warming planet isn’t one the ski and snowboard world can address alone.