Call for Submissions – The Winter Olympics & Their Environments

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Call for Submissions – The Winter Olympics & Their Environments

A NiCHE Series

Submission Deadline: December 12, 2025

Publication: January/February 2026

The twenty-fifth Winter Olympics are being held in Milano and Cortina, Italy, between February 6 and 22, 2026. The games will be a showcase of athletic prowess and achievement, featuring the world’s best athletes. However, the Olympics are about more than just sports; they are about politics, economics, social inequities, human rights, cultural diversity, international relations—and the environment. 

The connection between sports and the environment (both natural and built) are evident during the Winter Olympics, which depend so heavily on specific geographies and winter weather conditions. Snow, ice, and cold temperatures are top of mind for athletes and observers leading up to and during the games: Will there be enough snow? Is it too warm? Moreover, the Winter Olympics are built on assumptions that conquering winter climates is a feat worth pursuing; attempts to modify, mimic, and even “improve” nature through artificial snowmaking, indoor ice rinks, and bobsled courses untethered from actual mountains demonstrate how people have tried to create “ideal” winter weather and geographies for the games. As a result, the Winter Olympics offer a rare moment when global audiences can collectively reflect on attempts to transform and control winter weather and environments.

As far back as the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, organizers and athletes have had to manage frustratingly erratic winter weather, but the impact of global warming on the games has brought the relationship between the Winter Games and the environment into popular discourse. Readers may remember the 2010 Winter Olympics, when the Vancouver Olympic Committee had to truck and helicopter snow from other parts of the province for events at the Cypress ski resort.[1] It was so warm that resorts struggled to make artificial snow with their expensive new snowmaking machines. What they made was washed away by the rain. While extreme winter weather variations and low snowfall were not new problems for the resort, the scale of the issue—and the international attention it attracted—made climate change impossible to ignore. Concerns about the games grow as the world continues to warm.

For The Winter Olympics & Their Environments series, we are inviting submissions that explore the intersections between the environment and the games. Submissions can focus on any Winter Olympic sport. Transnational and comparative pieces will also be accepted. (Can any story about the Olympics truly be tied to a single nation?). 

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

  • Environmental transformation
  • Climate and climate change
  • (Changing) relationships with nature
  • Weather histories
  • Sports histories
  • Economics
  • Energy histories
  • Indigenous histories
  • Histories of science/technology

Submissions may take the form of:

  • Articles (maximum 1,200 words)
  • Photo essays
  • Personal reflections

Please submit a brief description (max. 200 words) of your proposed submission to Jesse Ritner (jesse.ritner@gcsu.edu) by December 12, 2025. Authors will be notified of their acceptance by December 19, 2025. The first articles in the series will be published on the NiCHE website in late January 2026 and will continue to be published biweekly (two pieces per week) until the end of February 2026. If you have any questions, please contact Jesse (jesse.ritner@gcsu.edu) or Blake Butler (mblakebutler18@gmail.com). 

[1] The Canadian Press, “Olympic site gets snow trucked from afar,” CBC Sports, February 2, 2010, https://www.cbc.ca/sports/2.722/olympic-site-gets-snow-trucked-from-afar-1.932819; Suzanne Goldenberg, “Canada’s mild climate leaves Winter Olympics short of snow,” The Guardian, February 10, 2010,https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2010/feb/10/vancouver-lacks-snow

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M. Blake Butler and Jesse Ritner

M. BLAKE BUTLER: I have been a member of NiCHE since 2020 and am currently an editor and book review co-editor. Outside of NiCHE, I am a member of the Protect Our Winters (Canada) Science Alliance and am employed as a historian and project manager with Know History, Inc., a historical services firm based in Ottawa. I have been a member of the research team supporting the Yukon Residential Schools Missing Children Project since February 2023. My personal research examines Canadian and environmental histories, with an emphasis on winter-based topics. My doctoral dissertation explored the history of snow in Vancouver between the mid-nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth century. | JESSE RITNER is an Assistant Professor of History at Georgia College & State University. He has been an editor at NiCHE since January 2025 and is a member of the Protect Our Winters (United States) Science Alliance. He currently writing a book project titled Snowguns: How Snowmaking, Carbon Emissions, and Cheap Labor Built the U.S. Ski Industry, which examines issues of climate, justice, technology, and capitalism.

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