Snow still arriving at Cypress Mountain only days before Vancouver Olympics set to open

Snow still being brought in to Cypress Mountain

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Snow is still being trucked and flown in to Cypress Mountain in an effort to get the Olympic venues ready for the Vancouver Games, which open Friday.

The first event scheduled for Cypress Mountain is women’s moguls qualifying on Saturday, with the finals to be raced later that day.

Athletes will get their first look at the conditions later Monday afternoon, when training is scheduled. Only athletes and coaches will be able to enter the venue.

“For safety reasons and our desire not to have any of the course preparation work impacted, we decided just to let on the people that are absolutely necessary for the training,” said Dave Cobb, the executive vice president of the Vancouver organizing committee.

The weather in and around Vancouver has created some problems for Olympic organizers. Although the venues at Whistler — where the Alpine and Nordic events will be held — are fine, the Cypress Mountain venues have been affected by the unseasonably warm weather.

“There’s still a lot of snow being trucked and flown in to ensure we have enough contingency snow if the warm weather continues,” Cobb said. “There’s a lot of activity going on.”

John Furlong, the CEO of VANOC, said the organizing committee briefed the International Olympic Committee on the state of the mountain Saturday.

“They didn’t raise any concern about Cypress,” Furlong said. “They’ve been up on Cypress with our team all along, and I think they’re very happy with the level of commitment and work that’s taken place up there.

“Everybody is quite confident we will get to where we need to be.”

In order to get the venues prepared, organizers already have canceled two days of halfpipe training and pushed back parallel giant slalom training by two days. They also have chemicals that can be used to harden the snow.

“At this stage, if there has been any use of it (the chemicals), it’s been very minimal,” Cobb said. “When we expect to use it if necessary would be closer to games time when the snow needs to be harder.

“The weather’s a little bit cooler now. It doesn’t have to be below freezing to have the snow hard enough.”

Cobb said organizers were considering using the chemicals on the halfpipe course. The halfpipe competition starts on Feb. 17.

“We’re happy with the state of the other courses. On the freestyle course today training starts,” Cobb said. “We’ll get a sense of how the courses hold up over the next few days.”