How bone-dry Beijing created snow for the Winter Olympics

The host city of this year’s Winter Games has had to make millions of cubic metres of the white stuff, helped by a Finn who is the world’s top snowmaker.

Simon Willis

Updated Feb 4, 2022 – 1.39pm, first published at 9.52am

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″You know why I have this in the car?” Mikko Martikainen asks, clutching a penknife. “So if we hit a reindeer, I can get out and kill it.” It is a foggy morning in late November, and Martikainen and I are driving through the forests of Lapland in northern Finland, dodging reindeer grazing on the verges. We are heading to a small ski resort near Rovaniemi, a city bang on the Arctic Circle that is the centre of Finland’s winter-tourism industry. According to legend, Father Christmas lives there.