I'm William Brangham and this is "Horizons."

The Winter Olympics are in full swing, but these games are a far cry from the first so-called modern Olympics, held in Athens 130 years ago.

Advances in training and technology and psychology have helped push athletes to the top of their games, while rising temperatures are transforming the snow beneath the athletes' feet.

We look at some of the driving forces reshaping the modern-day Olympics, coming up next.

♪ Narrator: Support for "Horizons" has been provided by Steve and Marilyn Kerman and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Friends of the NewsHour.

♪ This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

From the David M. Rubenstein Studio at WETA in Washington, here is William Brangham.

Welcome to "Horizons" from PBS News.

We are all caught up in Olympic fever over here, so we are going to devote a whole show to the games.

A little later, we'll look at how climate change is making it increasingly difficult to hold the Winter Olympics and what researchers and some athletes are doing about it.

But, first, we want to talk about what's going on in the minds of these competitors.

Watching these games, it is hard not to marvel at the exquisite focus and concentration of the Olympians.

We wanted to talk with someone who could give us a glimpse into how you prepare these competitors mentally for the stress of this enormous stage.

Psychologist Caroline Silby is the head of sports psychology and mental performance at U.S.

Figure Skating.

She's a former competitive skater herself and now works as part of a large interdisciplinary team, exercise physiologists, nutritionists, doctors, as well as coaches, to help U.S.

skaters perform at their peak.

I spoke with Silby earlier in between practice sessions and competitions.

Caroline Silby, thank you so much for talking with us.

Will you just tell us where are you sitting right now?

I am sitting right now in Milan, Italy.

And I am at the Olympic Village.

So, I know what your official title is, but, when you're talking to a layperson, how do you describe what your job is?

So, there's really a dual objective in my role in mental performance and sports psychology and that is to help athletes use their sport experiences to develop into healthy, happy and empowered people.

And we also want them to have sport outcomes that match their capabilities.

At the Olympic Games, when you look at the data, it's really only a 3% difference in performance between the athlete who wins the gold medal at the Olympic Games and the athlete who does not make the Olympic team.

Wait, a 3% difference?

That small?

That small.

And so the good news about that is really small changes can make a significant impact on performance outcomes and the quality of the experience that an athlete has.

And so that's really my role, is to try to tweak and figure out, with an athlete, what's really going to work for them to kind of close that gap.

You mentioned that one of your jobs is to help them be a bunch of things.

One of them was happy.

Does it really matter?

Does it matter if an athlete is happy?

I believe that it matters for all of us, right?

Because the last thing we want is athletes to have this incredible performance moment and have it be over, and it be nothing more than a relief from their suffering.

Nobody wants that.

And I like to say, I don't know if figuring yourself out is going to guarantee that you get the results that you want, but I sure believe it gives you the best chance while allowing you to enjoy that process.

So, for you, unlike the rest of us, when you ask someone, "How are you doing today?," it actually is a real question.

It's not just chit-chat.

Yeah, in fact, I wrote the athletes on our team a little letter.

And in it, I said, "Hey, when I stop by and I say, "'How are you doing?,' I really mean it.

"You can tell me, but you don't have to.

"You can also say whatever it is and just sort of move on."

So we're very fluid.

It's not that we're always, you know, sitting in an office somewhere, you know, or the athlete's laying down like the old school on a couch having psychotherapy.

You don't bring a therapist's couch with you to Milan?

No, not at all.

My therapy couch is usually a locker room somewhere.

And one thing that I think we really have to keep in mind about all the athletes here at the Olympic Games is, they're not only developing their technical, tactical skill sets in whatever sport they perform in or play, but they're just evolving, developing people at the same time.

At U.S.

Figure Skating, one of the things that we really feel strongly about is introducing support early on in our pipeline.

So we take very young athletes and start introducing these concepts and how they all work together, how, you know, strength and conditioning and sports psych, we can do all these things together.

So I'll give you an example.

So to warm up before you go out to play or to practice, you may be doing your off-ice warm-up exercises, but you're also doing your breathing to get your mind ready.

And so we're teaching very young kids these ideas that it's all just incorporated into their training right from the beginning.

So, if someone is in an anxious moment, are there physical, simple things that they can do to help get... to help move out of that... that phase?

So athletes sort of want to be able to have adrenaline and be in a state of excitement before they compete.

But they... Sometimes that can become uncomfortable.

And when it becomes uncomfortable, we can actually dial that down.

So temperature change is one of the primary ways that you can change your physiology and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is actually a little bit of a relaxation response.

So you can plunge your face into ice cold water in the sink, you can put ice packs on your face or your neck, even just walking outside or putting your face outside the window can help.

Breathing, tightening and releasing your body.

We use a lot of grounding strategies as well, sort of noting your surroundings and grounding yourself in that.

There's ear massaging that activates the vagus nerve, which helps, again, sort of with a calm response.

There's tapping on your stomach and pushing on the belly button.

So there's all sorts of things that we play around with and... and see what works for... for what athletes.

So, yeah, you may see some athletes pulling on their ears.

[Laughs] We always thought that was just a nervous tick.

Yeah, exactly.

[Laughs] It may be.

You were describing before the 3% distinction between those who win and those who don't even get to travel.

These sports are won by milliseconds, millimeters.

I mean, that has got to be incredibly difficult as far as trying to help these young athletes stay focused, knowing that the margin of error is so minuscule.

It is, and one of the things that we work a lot on is not pushing pressure away, but really embracing it.

And... and knowing that that uncertainty that comes with performance can be really uncomfortable, but it's not dangerous.

It's just uncomfortable.

And so we help athletes learn strategies, how to regulate and to reframe and to recover in that those sort of situations that are extremely high pressure so that they feel really confident that they can manage their way through performance no matter how they feel in a given moment.

For a lot of people, pressure can make them more decisive.

And so they respond extremely well in a pressure situation.

They lock in.

Other people have to work a little bit harder at it.

But I think it's interesting just to note that when we're faced with uncertainty, the mind has a very clear cut way of responding to that that tries to protect us.

Right?

So it's the scary movie syndrome.

You sort of close your eyes or, you know, jam some popcorn in your mouth and... and remind yourself that you're okay, you're sitting at home or you're in a movie theater and you're safe.

And so, similar to that, athletes can learn how to differentiate for themselves, for their bodies and for their minds, those moments of high intense pressure and uncertainty that, "Hey, I'm not in danger.

This is a surface device.

"I know what to do on a surface device."

We have seen several instances where elite athletes have very publicly struggled with the pressures of the ups and downs.

Michael Phelps, we've seen Naomi Osaka, perhaps most famously Simone Biles at the Tokyo Games.

When... when the general public sees an athlete struggling like that, very publicly on the... on the big stage, what do you wish that we all would think about, all of us out here in the general public?

When you see that happen, it can be sort of a perfect storm.

Everybody wants to sort of define the answer.

"It was this one thing that happened.

"And if this athlete had thought these three words, "then, that wouldn't have happened."

And it's just not the case.

And these athletes are developing human beings.

And... and there are so many pieces of the puzzle.

And so even though athletes look incredibly happy in a certain moment, you know, it doesn't... it.... it doesn't mean that it's not hard and it doesn't mean that athletes, even at the height of their success, don't have vulnerabilities, just like all the rest of us.

We all have them, right?

And so we're all just trying to navigate through them in whatever ways that we find have been useful to us.

And it's the same for these high-performing athletes.

Yeah, they just have to do it with 300 million people watching on television and 100 million writing about them on social media and commentators and everything else on top of it all.

Yeah, and a big smile on their face and... and look like it's easy.

Yeah.

Caroline Silby, so great to talk to you.

Thank you so much for taking the time.

Yeah, thank you for having me, love being with you.

We turn now to the Olympics and climate change.

A warming world is soon going to dictate where and when the Olympics are held, perhaps even whether they can be held the same way we do them today.

A recent study commissioned by the International Olympic Committee showed that by 2050, the number of locations that could host a Winter Games was shrinking considerably because of decreasing snowfall.

Cities that bid for the Olympics must also host the Paralympics right after.

So a consistent covering of snow is a requirement that is increasingly hard to meet.

A 2024 study of a century's worth of snowfall in the Alps showed a sharp decline in the last 40 years.

Park City, Utah, where the 2034 games are to be held, looks like this, the result of a dismal winter so far.

So what does that mean for the Olympics?

We turn now to Elizabeth Burakowski.

She studies how climate change impacts winters in the US's Northeast.

She's at the University of New Hampshire.

Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here.

For people who are still digging out of a major snowfall or just starting to thaw out in the south and southeast of the country, they might think, "It looks like winter "is doing just fine.

"Thank you very much."

What do you tell the people who say that?

I'd like to first start with the distinction between weather, climate and climate change.

So weather is what we're experiencing right here, right now on the ground.

For example, here in New Hampshire, it's finally above freezing.

We have a lot of snow on the ground and it's not too windy.

That's our weather state right now.

Some folks might experience climate as a long-term average of those weather conditions.

So when I think about a New England climate, I generally think of it as being cold and snowy.

If you live in the southeast, you're probably thinking it's a little bit more mild in wintertime.

When we talk about climate change, however, that's a sustained trend in temperature and precipitation that is sustained over decades or longer.

So the distinction is really important here.

One winter does not just cancel global warming if you have one cold winter.

When you have multiple warm winters that are dominating your trend, that's when you're seeing climate change and global warming.

So unfortunately, when we're seeing these cold temperatures right now, that doesn't mean it's an end of our trend.

It just means that, well, for folks who like winter, we got really lucky this year.

Right, exactly.

And those who hate it are still suffering through it.

So overall, what is climate change doing to our winters?

What is that trend?

Well, what we're seeing in the United States is that winter is warming at nearly every location.

When you look at which seasons are warming the fastest, winter comes out on top by far.

About 76% of the 245 long-term observation locations in the U.S.

are showing that winter is the fastest-warming season.

And this is concerning.

Our winter warming hot spots are also concentrated in New England and the upper Midwest.

In those places, we're seeing double the rate of winter warming.

Places like Burlington, Vermont, for example, they've warmed eight degrees today compared to 1970s.

So that's concerning.

That means that the winters that our parents grew up with, at least my parents, is not the same that my grandkids or my kids are now growing up in.

So for New England, that's really important.

We're in this transition zone where a generation from now, we might not see the same winters that we're experiencing today.

I mean, it's really remarkable that within our own lifetimes, we are seeing such a profound shift.

Yeah, and what I've seen, I have a personal story from my family.

My parents, they grew up ice fishing in New Jersey and they learned to ski there in the 70s.

So when they were kids, the average winter temperature in New Jersey was indeed below freezing.

But today, over the course of their lifetime, they've actually seen their winter temperature in New Jersey warm above the melting point.

So now you're much less likely to see lake ice, you're much less likely to see snow.

We do have this one winter, though, that is changing things.

But the overall trend is towards a much winter winter that they experience compared to what they experienced in the past.

Okay, so some might argue, okay, so you can't ski as much.

Your parents can't go ice fishing in New Jersey anymore.

But there are, and I know this is part of your own work, much broader impacts than just those winter activities.

Yeah, skiing and snow sports in general are a huge economic driver.

This accounts to about 72 billion dollars in economic activity.

So that's money that is circulating not just in the ski resorts themselves, but also in the local communities that are benefiting from having additional jobs, for example, additional revenue that's associated with restaurants and lodging.

So it goes well beyond the boundaries of the resorts themselves and supports local communities.

In a place like New Hampshire, for example, nearly half of our visitor spending in winter in our northern counties is coming from the ski industry.

And that's a big chunk of our meal and tax revenue.

A place like Wisconsin, they're hosting the Birkie next week, which is a huge Nordic ski race.

And that brings in about 20 million dollars.

So up to 20% of their economic activity for that region, which is otherwise a pretty rural community.

Next week, I was looking at the forecast and in that neck of the woods, it is looking like it's going to be above freezing.

And in 2017, they had to cancel the Birkie because of a lack of snow.

So I don't think that's going to happen this year.

I think it actually looks pretty good given the state of things.

But that does mean that you're going to have to see some hard pivots when a huge economic driver might be threatened by a warm winter.

As I mentioned before, the International Olympic Committee is starting to really look closely at this and they... we spoke earlier with a researcher, Daniel Scott, who did this study for the IOC, and it showed that of the cities that they thought might be good candidates for the Winter Olympics, that that pool of cities was shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.

How do you imagine that that is going to play out?

Well, when we think about climate change, it's consistent with what we expect to see, that fewer places in terms of their likelihood of having a cold winter, of having conditions that are amenable to making snow and retaining a natural snowpack, that number starts to decline.

And even when we do look at probabilities and likelihood of being able to host the Olympics, you still get curveballs through weather.

We think of Utah right now.

That was one of the host cities that was expected to be a viable location for hosting the Olympics.

But this particular winter is not showing its really strongest suit.

Right, I remember the Sochi Olympics not that long ago where the Russians were going to incredible lengths to make snow and then they would put these enormous thermal blankets over them to keep them alive during the day and then pull those blankets off and make more snow on top of that.

Is artificial snow and snowmaking a viable replacement for winter sports?

It's a... Snowmaking is a really important adaptation strategy, so it'll improve the resilience of winter sports to warming winters and lower natural snowfall, but at the end of the day, it still relies on cold temperatures.

You can make snow at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but it's not going to be very high quality and you're going to be wasting a lot of energy and water when you do so because it's just not going to be the best snow.

The ideal temperature for making snow is actually related more to what they call the wet bulb temperature.

So that relates the temperature and the amount of moisture in the air.

So, for example, at 100% humidity, if it's 22 degrees Fahrenheit, that's also your wet bulb temperature.

But if your humidity is a lot lower than the temperature, like wet bulb will drop considerably.

So the ideal temperature for making snow is wet bulb temperatures that are below 22 degrees Fahrenheit.

And that's a lot to ask in a warming atmosphere.

The kicker here is a warmer atmosphere also holds more moisture.

So when resorts that are planning on hosting the Olympics or venues that are hosting the Olympics want to make snow, they're going to be up against not just warmer temperatures, but also possibly more humidity in the air as well.

And both of those make it challenging to make snow.

We're going to hear from an Olympic athlete a little bit about what it's like to... to compete on that snow.

But is it difficult, I imagine, for athletes to suddenly be training and competing in wildly different conditions underfoot?

As a lifelong skier, I've been skiing and riding since the 1980s and 90s, and I can tell a difference even as a non-professional athlete.

My preference is definitely powder days, but I also like consistency, especially when I'm trying to teach my kids how to ski.

So when snowmaking is available, if it's consistent, it can actually serve as a nice alternative when Mother Nature is not providing.

And that consistency, I can imagine, really plays into their training.

When you have wild conditions that are going between warm and hot and snowy and not snowy, that winter weather whiplash can certainly make things a lot more complicated and really challenge them in their training.

We know that the issue of climate change, some people hear that term and it sets off a partisan alarm bell for them, that that... Republicans, generally speaking, don't see it nearly as much of a concern as Democrats tend to.

There's a big cultural issue on this.

We see this even in the current administration.

Do you think that something like the Olympics and the inability to hold and host these kinds of games gives us a way to sort of punch through that partisan noise, that we can talk about climate in a way that impacts people, that we all sort of rally around and cheer for every year?

I hope that being outdoors, that recreating outside and taking advantage of our public plans is a way that unites folks.

I know some folks that I don't necessarily agree with their political positions, and I tend not to talk about the climate issue per se, but I will talk about energy resiliency and I will talk about energy independence.

When I look at a place like New Hampshire, for example, we don't have any natural sources of fossil fuels in our state.

Our geology just simply does not support that.

And talking about where our energy is coming from becomes a pretty decent conversation.

I think a lot of us want to see that we have energy sources that are coming from within our state and supporting jobs here.

When I also think about energy resiliency, when we have the power go out, now we plug in our EV to the house and we're able to run the fridge off of it.

It's actually a very nice, handy power storage that's available there.

It's a way to talk with folks about adaptation that's not necessarily about reducing emissions, but also about making sure that you can make it through a winter when you lose power.

Elizabeth Burakowski of the University of New Hampshire, thank you so much for talking with us.

Thank you so much for having me.

The Olympic athletes competing on the snow in the northern Italian Alps right now do not need any reminders about the impact of climate change.

They understand quite clearly that things are changing and changing quickly.

I recently talked with a member of the U.S.

Olympic ski team about this.

Commentator: This is Julia Kern.

Brangham: Two-time Olympian Julia Kern skis cross-country for Team USA.

She told me that just in her own career, she has seen dramatic changes in the quality and quantity of snow.

Kern's part of an organization called POW, Protect Our Winters, that is urging greater action on climate change.

I asked her how warmer winters affect her training and her competition.

Here's an excerpt of our conversation.

We're skiing in a lot warmer, softer snow, a lot more artificial snow.

We prepared for warm conditions here because that's something that's more and more common.

Every championship I've been to, except for Beijing, was quite warm now.

And so that's becoming more of what we expect in Central Europe during this time of the year.

What kinds of things do you have to do to accommodate this constant changing surface under your skis?

There are quite a few things.

I think the first, yeah, is we're on different skis, warmer skis, base materials that can glide better in the warmer conditions.

The wax we put on our skis is warmer and different.

And then the other thing is like the way we ski changes.

You're not getting as much out of each push when you're sinking in.

And so you have to have more endurance and pace yourself more because the races you have... it's just a lot more resistance.

If you imagine, like, pushing on an icy surface versus something that's really soft, like mashed potatoes, it's going to feel very different.

For people who don't know the level of athleticism that you're competing at, if people just think snow is snow is snow, what difference does it make?

I think it makes a big difference, specifically to ski racing.

It makes the... like, more challenging.

We're skiing in more challenging terrain, deeper snow.

I think, in a bigger scale picture, it means the snowpack that we're experiencing now or the reduction of snowpack impacts the water systems downstream to our communities.

So it's not just whether we have snow to ski on anymore, it's do we have enough water for our communities that we depend on?

And so I think people often just jump to the conclusion that snow means skiing, but it's also that snow melt is the water resource for a lot of places in the summer months.

And so it has such a downstream impact to everyone.

What do you tell people who think, "Why are you talking about those issues?"

I think I'm talking about them because that is where I have power.

It's in my voice.

I could just go ski and do nothing and that's not going to change anything.

But what I can do is use my voice and try to help people understand that this isn't just impacting people who love skiing, it's impacting all of us.

It's our home communities that depend on these resources.

And we all have ways in helping move the needle.

And it may look different for each person.

And for me, I would feel pretty bad just to sit around and not do anything.

Something is better than nothing, in my opinion.

Julia, we wish you the absolute best in all the competition.

Thank you so much for talking to us.

Thank you for having me.

And that is it for this episode of "Horizons."

Thank you so much for joining us.

Narrator: Support for "Horizons" has been provided by Steve and Marilyn Kerman and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Friends of the NewsHour.

♪ This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

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