Val di Fiemme: Anna Rydén on Italy’s Sporting Heartland

CHOOSE FIVE. We remember Kalla, Olsson and the white fairy tales from the past.

Now the forest is brown, the snow artificial and the future uncertain.

It has been 20 years since its inception – but the sport has never felt more threatened.

The memory is white. The reality is brown.

This is classic Swedish sports ground. In the Italian valley at the foot of the Dolomites, success has been reaped for a quarter of a century.

Marie-Helen Westin became Billan with the entire Swedish people and both Torgny Mogren and Gunde Svan’s names are imprinted from the 1991 gold.

I remember the snow. It lay heavy over the trees. It embedded the tracks. It made everything quiet. As much as snow can do.

I remember Calla’s breakthrough.

It was here that she broke through – on a hill bathed in white. It was like a fairy tale. A Swedish 20-year-old who stepped past Virpi Kuitunen and stabbed from. Straight into the heart of the Swedish people.

I remember Johan Olsson’s five-mile run.

How he made a move that no one thought would last, how he skated and stretched his triceps along the way and how a chasing Dario Cologna fell. All surrounded by the snow-covered branches. That feeling of winter for real.

Artificial respiration

Soon it will hopefully be time for new gold-edged fairy tales to be written. There are only five weeks left until the Olympics.

But when I stand in the same stadium where so much Swedish sports history was created, I look out over a valley with two faces. The landscape is a patchwork of brown and white – some firs are only half covered in snow, as if winter had started to paint but then lost the energy.

Because those snow-covered fir trees seen on TV are a backdrop. On the shadow side of the valley, the snow cannons win. They try to cover what nature can no longer handle on its own. On the other side, the sun shines against a brown mountain wall.

The end of the Tour de Ski is approaching for the twentieth time. An anniversary with dirty edges. The snow is imported, thin, forced. Like a trace of something that has been.

The organizers of Val di Fiemme are struggling. They are doing a great job to bring about both a tour end and an upcoming Olympics.

It will work, says Fis. The classic climb will also be decided this year.

Because thankfully it was sub-zero in the end, it was possible to give winter an artificial breath. The snow cannons are in high gear.

But every year it gets harder. Every year we approach the limit of what can be saved.

The tracks leading to the hill get narrower and narrower, dirtier and dirtier.

Normally, you can build up the entire area at the top of the hill – but this year the snow has not been enough. The plus degrees have been around for a long time. That last, significant wall has been threatened to the last. The part of Alpe Cermis that the skiers have to climb has been completely closed this week, despite the fact that it is high season for seed skiing. According to information, as recently as a week ago, there was concern about whether it would be possible to carry it out at all.

That is exactly the problem

At the same time, this is just the beginning.

In the space of a month, the same landscape will host both the Tour de Ski finish, Marcialonga and then the crowning achievement: the Olympic Winter Games.

All on artificial snow.

And maybe that is exactly the problem.

Because even if they succeed – how do you get more people to want to play a sport that demands so much? How will the next generation be exposed to cross-country skiing when it is no longer readily available?

Where national team skiers have to leave the country to get good training conditions – like Moa Lundgren, who went to Davos because the conditions in Sundsvall were not good. Where the international ski federation Fis is forced to raise the upper limit for competition locations – from 1,800 to 2,000 meters above sea level – in order to guarantee snow.

It’s like artificial respiration and everyone knows it only lasts a certain amount of time.

What was once the sport’s most innovative creation – a Tour de France on snow – has become something we hardly recognize anymore. Neither in form nor environment.

And those white winter pictures we remember from Kalla, from Olsson, from Northug – they become just that.

Memory pictures.

Things you have to look up on Youtube.

Soon they may not only feel distant.

Soon they may be impossible.