VANCOUVER - Winter Games officials have given up on any help from Mother Nature and will now be trucking in snow for the freestyle skiing and snowboarding events at Cypress Mountain, on Vancouver's North Shore.
The forecast for the week ahead suggests that there will be no new snow for the mountain, nor will it get cold enough to allow them to make any, the organizers said Wednesday after their final board meeting before next month's Games.
"We are planning that we will not have snow," said Cathy Priestner Allinger, executive vice-president of sport and Games operations for the organizing committee, known as VANOC.
Contingency plans are now being rolled out which include using straw and wood to take the place of snow to build the base for the courses.
But Priestner Allinger says they believe there is enough snow elsewhere on the mountain and they will use trucks, snow cats and if necessary helicopters to move snow to the event sites.
"We are going to create a fantastic field of play and we are just doing it a little differently than we had originally planned," she said.
Christian Hrab, high performance director for Canada Snowboard, said the design of the course is what matters most to his athletes.
"What we are looking for is shape," said Hrab.
"How it is built is irrelevant to our performance. Usually it's made of snow. If the builders in VANOC find alternate ways of giving us a great course, it will not affect us."
The lack of snow could result in a less demanding course for the ski cross and snowboard cross races, but moguls and aerials don't require much snow, said Peter Judge, chief executive officer of the Canadian Freestyle Ski Association.
"If they don't have the material they can't build the features (jumps) as big or as radical as maybe they had originally planned," said Judge. "That may have some affect in terms of dumbing the course down a little bit."
Judge doubted the change would harm the image of the Vancouver Games.
"Everybody understands we are dealing with outdoor sports and with venues that are susceptible to these kind of things," he said. "I don't see it would be something that would be extremely negative.
"At the end of the day it's all going to come off, it's going to be white and it's going to look good."
Mild temperatures and heavy rains earlier this month forced officials to close the mountain ahead of schedule, as snow gave way to mud.
Organizers were always prepared for weather challenges at all of their outdoor events and said Wednesday in some respects they were thankful that they were only having the one problem so far.
Whistler has snow, but that doesn't mean it hasn't posed its own problems for Olympic organizers.
Lenders have moved to auction off the assets of Intrawest ULC, including the B.C. ski resort that will be home to the Olympic downhill races next month.
Intrawest said it will be "business as usual," despite the possibility Whistler-Blackcomb could be on the auction block even as Olympic athletes grace its slopes.
Dan Doyle, VANOC's executive vice-president of construction, said the venues in Whistler are ready.
"It doesn't make very good business sense for people to put them out of business at the time of the year when they're making their most earnings," Doyle told reporters in Vancouver following the local organizing committee board's final meeting before the Games.
Doyle said bankruptcy doesn't happen overnight.
"It's a long process, it's a process that takes months. Given all of that, we're very confident that the Games will go on at those two venues in Whistler, and they'll go on with the co-operation of the people that are running the mountain," he said, noting that Games organizers have sought legal advice on the situation.
Whistler Mountain will host the alpine skiing events, while sister mountain Blackcomb is the site of the sliding centre. Both mountains make up the Intrawest resort.
While Mother Nature isn't helping organizers, it is helping is helping VANOC's bottom line.
"We have a snow clearing budget which we haven't had to use, so we've put that effort, that equipment and people against moving the snow to the course as opposed to clearing snow off bleachers," said Dave Cobb, the committee's deputy executive director.
But Cobb didn't rule out being forced to dip into the committee's $50 million operational contingency fund in order to cover off the costs associated with moving to their plan B.
