The trickiest Olympic event: snow

There is nothing that ticks off athletes, spectators, and organizers at these Winter Olympic Games quite so much as ... snow.

Ironic, eh?

Impossible though it would be, of course, to hold the Games without the stuff, snowstorms over the last few days have shown that you can have too much of a good thing.

Competitors have struggled to cope with changing snow conditions that completely transformed the nature of their races. Organizers have battled through the night to clear downhill pistes of the unwanted white stuff. And fans have braved blizzards so severe they could scarcely see the slopes.

The weather in Turin, and in the mountains above the city where the outdoor events are being staged, has been changeable. At times it has been downright foul. That is hardly surprising in the Alps at this time of year, but it has underlined a key aspect of winter sports: Who wins the gold can depend on something as unpredictable as meteorological conditions.

There is no such thing as a level playing field in winter sports (except, naturally, in the rink events). Because the athletes do not compete against each other at the same time, changing weather conditions from one minute to the next sometimes decide who wins. A gust of wind can keep a ski jumper aloft for a critical second or so longer; a flurry of snow can slow down an alpine skier.

The weather's impact was dramatically clear during the men's Super G on Saturday, when a practically unknown Frenchman, Pierre Emmanuel Dalcin, seized the lead in an early run, and then watched disbelievingly as heavier and heavier snow blinded and slowed his more favored competitors one by one.

"You can't see anything. It was rough, dark," said US skier Steve Nyman as he finished, unable to match Mr. Dalcin's time.

Eventually the storm grew so bad that the judges interrupted the race after 17 of the 63 competitors had already gone, and restarted it from scratch in the afternoon, when the sun came out. Mr. Dalcin skied off-course, and most of the favorites did well.

In the meantime, teams of ski instructors had scraped and shoveled the fresh snow off the track, stripping it back to its prepared surface.

Unlike recreational skiers, who revel in the crunch and squeak of fresh snow under their skis, racers prefer icy conditions that give them greater speed and control.

At 80 m.p.h., they don't want to catch an edge in a tuft of snow that could send them cartwheeling down the slope. Fresh snow also means more friction, which makes for slower times.

Meanwhile, their skinny-ski compatriots at the cross country venues travel with as many as 20 different pairs of skis - flexible for soft snow, more rigid for harder conditions - and teams of wax technicians to help them cope with any sort of snow they might have to ski on.

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