The Olympic downhill run in Kvitfjell is devilishly steep, though when we ride it it’s padded out with powder. The resort crew might have done their best to piste the slope in the morning but the snow has been falling so heavily since then that they may as well have gone back to bed or clipped into a pair of skis themselves.

The Olympiabakken, as its known is Norway’s longest black run – nearly three kilometres from top to bottom – and when you wake up the next morning your legs can tell. The thought of skiing down it at the 80mph (128km/h) Olympic standard is enough to send shivers through a thermal-layered spine.

So why did Norway, a country which already has much of the infrastructure needed to host the Winter Olympic Games – “all the ice halls and arenas from 1994 are still used today,” says Odd – withdraw from the running for 2022?

“It was mostly the opinion of the people,” says Odd, who needless to say would have been delighted to see the Olympic downhill races return to Kvitfjell, as they would have done had the Oslo 2022 bid been successful.

“In the end it was the people in Norway who really turned it down, but [public opinion] was also the same before 1994”

“The concept was good. It could’ve been more local than the average Olympics. In the end the people turned it down, but [public opinion] was also the same before 1994. It was only when we built the arenas and everyone came that people’s opinions changed. This time social media and the media turned people around before the decision was made.

“I think the Norwegian people also look at the members of IOC as a little bit high end. The image of the IOC needs to change. And then of course there was the big cost of Sochi.”

While originally budgeted at $12 billion US dollars, the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi ended up costing $51 billion, making it the most expensive Olympics in history. Many of the bids which withdrew from the process this time around pointed to that figure in their exit notes.

Simon Chadwick, Professor of Sports Enterprise at the University of Salford’s Business School, has written extensively on the lure of ‘mega games’. He believes the “seeds of destruction” were planted as far back as the Montreal Summer Games in 1976, and that while they begin with cost, that is not where they end.

“Montreal as a city didn’t finish paying for the Olympic Games until 2006,” he says. “It took 30 years for the city to pay for it, and that was local taxpayers money. I think that got people to start asking questions about the financial viability and legitimacy of hosting the games.”

He believes the declining European interest in hosting the Olympics is bound up in broader global, economic and geopolitical shifts.

“It is obviously about costs but also about the Olympics being used for political purposes. There were issues around corruption. The IOC and mega sports events around the world were being called into question, and we had financial austerity hitting, particularly in Europe.

“Economically the balance of power seems to be shifting from North America and Europe towards Asia and at the same time what you have is the movement of events towards these countries”

“It’s a whole host of things happening at the same time. Economically the balance of power seems to be shifting from North America and Europe towards Asia – particularly Eastern Asia – and at the same time what you have is the movement of events towards these countries in Asia because they’re prepared to throw resources at them for political purposes.”

From that standing, Professor Chadwick says, it’s only natural that the next three Games are taking place in Eastern Asia.

“The cost issue is one thing but the additional dimension is that rather than countries deciding that they’re going to do this and that they don’t care what people will say, they’re increasingly putting these decisions to a democratic vote and in Europe, Europeans are voting against them.

“This stands in stark contrast to Asia. If you think about the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, there is never going to be a democratic vote about whether or not those should be held. Countries like China, to a certain extent Korea, and countries like Kazakhstan and Russia not only have a less democratic approach to making such decisions, they have the money to pay for them.

“Sochi was just outrageous. That was a political project designed to cement Putin’s image at home and project a particular image overseas and I think that Beijing 2008 was very much consistent with that, albeit it wasn’t so presidential in the way that it was executed. I expect Beijing 2022 will be used in the same way.”

Despite this global progression, which could lead the Olympics even further into morally grey areas, Chadwick does think the Winter Games in Beijing could be a sustainable project, in terms of venue usage at least – particularly because of this shift in global economics.

“What the Chinese are very keen to do is to create facilities that will make China a tourism destination,” he says. “It wants people to go to China in the winter, and one of the ways you do that is by creating ski resorts. There’s a massive growth in the Chinese middle classes right now and they love skiing. So effectively what China is doing is meeting its own domestic demand for winter sports whilst also catering for broader international demand.”

This last note leaves Beijing 2022 comparable to Lillehammer 1994. Norway too used the Winter Olympics to create sustainable resorts – like Kvitfjell.

“If Lillehammer didn’t have the Olympics in ‘94 then activity north of Lillehammer would have been very slow,” admits Odd Stensrud.

The Lillehammer Games wasn’t immune from financial issues, but the legacy that’s been left is very much existent. So existent that we’ve been sleeping in it in Kvitfjell. We’ve been skiing it – down the slope where Tommy Moe pipped home favourite Kjetil André Aamodt to the gold by 0.04 seconds in the downhill, and through forests where powder has been piling so high that it took a full 10 minutes to find a dropped iPhone just off the piste.

For his part, Tommy adds: “They keep having the Winter Olympics in obscure countries rather than classic European or North American venues.

“Some of the past host countries already have everything built and could easily do it again, like Salt Lake, Calgary, Austria and even Lillehammer.”

Is the positive legacy of the Lillehammer Olympics, 24 years ago, because it was the last small ‘classic’ snow town to actually host the Games? Is it because Norway is a country with a culture and history of winter sports? Or is it because there was an appetite for the Games when they did arrive, and that the venues were put to good use afterwards?

If yes to the latter, it will be interesting to see the perhaps contrasting legacies that beckon from Pyeongchang, where the IOC have already warned of white elephants and poor ticket sales, and from Beijing. 78 new ski resorts opened in China in 2016 alone, and consultant Benny Wu was quoted in The Economist as saying: “it could grow at this rate for another 15-20 years”.

Do It Yourself:

Getting there:

We flew into Oslo airport on KLM airlines (courtesy of Visit Norway) and took the rain from Oslo to Ringebu. The train costs NOK 249 one way and takes two hours 25 minutes, with six daily departures in both directions. From there, Kvitfjell is a 20 minute drive or taxi costing NOK 350.

Accommodation:

We stayed as guests of the ski-in, ski-out Gudbrandsgard Hotel for four nights.

Gear rental:

We hired gear from Sport 1 Kvitfjell 

Click here to read the rest of our February ‘Olympic issue’

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