The environmentally unfriendly secret of winter sports is that many competitions take place on artificial snow. China’s water-scarce capital had to go to enormous lengths to make enough of it.
BEIJING — China did not move mountains to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. But it flooded a dried riverbed, diverted water from a key reservoir that supplies Beijing and resettled hundreds of farmers and their families, all to feed one of the most extensive snow-making operations in the history of the Games.