It’s finally the most wonderful time of the year: a time for joy and community, for jumping head first into a pile of snow, and spending an ungodly amount of time with family. For me, that’s my family’s yearly ski trip. There’s nothing quite like staying at a two-star motel that claims to now allow indoor smoking in the middle of Nowhere, Vermont, to bring on the wintertime cheer. But this year, tragedy struck—sunny, seventy degree weather in late November. The forecast for December doesn’t look like it will reach freezing temperatures. It looks like I’ll have to push back the date to our trip, maybe even to February break. 

I realized then the true threat that global warming is to the world. It’s caused some crazy things: irregular weather patterns and melting ice caps, but worst of all, it’s threatening the future of winter sports. Something must be done in order to preserve these widely beloved activities and keep them up with the times, so that our favorite snow-reliant exercises don’t melt away. Luckily, I’m a forward-thinking guy and have already drafted a few plans to adapt winter sports to become modern and climate change resistant.

The World Cup being hosted in Qatar this year was an omen for the future. Skiing and snowboarding competitions can be taken from the icy mountains and transferred over to sand dunes on the open desert. In order to replicate conditions, I also think we should import cacti from Arizona and create the first dry forest. 

My proposal for curling is quite simple: disband the sport entirely. I don’t care about the hit that the broom industry will take. Roller hockey covers most everything, though I propose we allow checking in order to up the stakes and give it that classic, violent ice hockey feel. Field hockey fans might cry out and exclaim that they are also a good replacement, but I will not be acknowledging them until they fix their odd circular little sticks. 

Figure skating will be a difficult one to reinvent. Roller skates don’t allow you to spin and twirl in the same way, and we already have classic dancing. However, I think that dancing with socks on a freshly waxed floor might do the trick. For a new bobsledding, we should look towards our childhoods for inspiration. Riding a little red wagon down a steep hill perfectly teeters the line between fun and fiasco. 

On the side of less official sports, I created a great recipe for homemade snowballs: glue six cotton balls together, marinate them in a half cup of water, and then freeze them for five hours. They won’t fall apart quite the same way, but it’s a great snow-free alternative. 

I hope that you find these helpful and are able to apply them to your lives. We need to band together in these troubling times. I will hopefully be in contact with the Olympic Committee soon, so these updates might be coming to humanity as a whole in 2026.