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After a big mistake on his first run, Daniel Yule assumed he was out of the men’s slalom at this season’s Alpine Ski World Cup. “I’d already packed my bags, and I was ready to go back to the hotel,” he said in a TV interview after last weekend’s event in Chamonix, France.
Instead, his time was just good enough to scrape into the second round. From there, in last place, the Swiss skier went on to win the entire event. Never before in 58 years of the competition had someone risen from such a low position to claim the trophy in a single run. It was a testament to Yule’s skiing—but also to the unignorable reality of climate change.
The temperature that day in Chamonix had risen to an extraordinary 12 degrees Celsius (54 degrees Fahrenheit)—far higher than the average maximum in February of –1. Competition rules stipulate that slalom skiers perform their second run in reverse order of their rank after the first—meaning that Yule, in last place, would go first on the second run on an unbroken piste. His competitors would be following on a slope rapidly melting under the midday sun, carved up by those before them, and the winner would be whoever clocked the lowest aggregate time across their two runs. “I was definitely lucky,” Yule said.
Slalom skiing demands that competitors navigate their way around a series of gates as they descend. Turning, therefore, is the defining factor of a race. When skiers perform first, like Yule in his second run, they’re able to choose where they turn around each gate. As they do this, the pressure of their skis creates ruts in the snow. Anybody who follows is then, to an extent, forced into these ruts, and as they deepen, it becomes harder for subsequent skiers to follow lines that suit their own style.
This rutting effect is more pronounced and occurs even faster on warmer days, says Arnaud de Mondenard, the head of alpine ski research at snow sports equipment brand Salomon. On top of this, as the snow on the run melts, it forms slush, which is more difficult for skiers to turn through. And, de Mondenard is keen to highlight, the snow doesn’t melt or compress evenly across the course. For the last skiers, judging the stability and texture of the terrain would have been a significant challenge.
On a gentle slope like that in Chamonix, these are all factors that would have contributed to the skiers’ performance. Clement Noel, the French athlete who dropped from first place to third, having performed over 2 seconds slower than Yule in the second run, said, “It was really difficult at the end. It was really, really bumpy.” By the time Noel had started his second run, the sun had been melting the piste for over 45 minutes since Yule had begun his.
Some have labeled Yule’s performance as one of the first examples of climate change disrupting professional sports results. Mark Maslin, a professor of earth system science at University College London and author of How to Save Our Planet, wrote in a post on LinkedIn: “Credit where credit is due to Yule, and congratulations to him … But nobody can deny what happened here … The reason was painfully obvious.”
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Europe experienced its second-warmest year on record in 2023, and the Alps are warming 2.5 times faster than the rest of the planet according to the European Environment Agency. According to an analysis published last year, the average temperature in the Alps has risen by 0.5 degrees Celsius every decade over the past 30 years. Michael Matiu, a researcher who studies climate change and snow cover at the University of Trento in Italy, says that, although the temperature in Chamonix that day was comparatively unusual, climate change has made such events more likely. “Such a warm event occurred before, maybe once every 30 years,” he says. “Now it’s maybe once in every 10.”
But Chemmy Alcott, who co-presents BBC 2’s Ski Sunday programme in the UK, and who interviewed Yule after the race, contests the claim that the warm weather made a significant contribution. According to Alcott, the piste had not degraded more than what might normally be expected. “I was there, and I’ve seen rattier second runs in winter snow,” she says. Yule won, in Alcott’s opinion, because he performed better—not because of the condition of the piste. “He skied the best second run out of everyone,” she says.
Alcott thinks it’s more important to focus on the disruption outside individual races. Between October 29 and December 10, 2023, the International Ski Federation (FIS) had to cancel 12 World Cup events across Europe and North America due to unsuitable conditions that included warm weather, rain, and a lack of snow. Two World Cup downhill skiing events were also supposed to take place in Chamonix on the same weekend as the men’s slalom, and two more in Garmisch, Germany. The FIS had to cancel all four of those because of warm weather too.
The slalom event was only spared, according to a statement the FIS sent to WIRED, because its shorter and narrower course could be topped up with snow using reserves brought from elsewhere on the resort. “When there is such extreme weather as we have seen the last few years, even the best-prepared organizer can’t always find a solution,” the FIS statement reads.
The FIS statement highlights how big a challenge the unpredictability of the weather poses to race planning. Event organizers often use snow machines, storage, and artificial snow to restore slopes when the piste has deteriorated too much or melted away entirely. But this comes at a huge expense—the Swiss ski resort of Zermatt has spent over £100 million ($126 million) on snow machines alone since 2002.
These practices have also been criticized by the professional skiing community for being a band-aid approach to the problem. In October 2023, hundreds of professional skiers signed an open letter to the FIS demanding that it become more environmentally sustainable. “Soon we won’t be able to produce artificial snow at some classic World Cup slopes anymore as winter temperatures rise above zero in low-altitude ski resorts more frequently,” the letter reads.
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Then there are the injuries. An unusually high number of winter athletes, including some of the best in the world, have sustained severe injuries while training or competing over the past two months. Nobody knows exactly why this is happening, Alcott says. But she and others believe that the variety and unpredictability of snow conditions have played a major part. “The inconsistencies with the snow conditions are making it really difficult for athletes to know how to ski a piste,” she says. “A lot of people are talking about it right now.”
The current competition season involves between eight and 10 events per discipline. Many in the community, including Alcott, believe that the FIS should reduce the number of events and focus on higher-altitude resorts, where conditions are less vulnerable to the changing climate. “They need to adapt to the environment, as opposed to trying to force the environment to adapt to the schedule,” Alcott says.
This leaves competitive snow sports with an uncertain future. Ed Leigh, who co-presents Ski Sunday with Alcott, says that climate change has caught the sport in a difficult situation. Amateur skiers will flock to resorts at higher altitudes, where snow is guaranteed, meaning those resorts lose the incentive to host expensive competitions. Those at lower altitudes will need the promotion that competitions offer, but will have to bear the enormous hosting costs that can run into the millions of dollars. Many may struggle to cover these as their incomes melt away along with the snow. “There comes a point when it’s not financially viable,” Leigh says.
