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Europe Dec 5th 2020 edition

Charlemagne

To ski or not to ski?

That is a question that reveals a surprising amount about Europe

Dec 5th 2020

I t took a pandemic to silence Gerhard Schmiderer. For the past quarter-century,
the now 70-year-old “DJ Gerhard” has blasted trashy hits for drunken après-skiers

at MooserWirt, a bar in St Anton, an Austrian ski resort. This year, however, the
speakers will be silent rather than blaring out yet another rendition of “The Final
Countdown”, a raucous anthem sung by big-haired Swedes. The usual revellers
dancing on tables in ski boots will be absent. The 500-metre run back to the resort
will no longer be strewn with those who have qua ed too much and fallen over in
the snow.

This sad story is repeated across the rest of Europe’s nearly 4,000 ski resorts.
Chairlifts have largely ground to a halt because of the pandemic. Bad memories
linger from spring, when an outbreak in Ischgl, another Austrian resort, led to at
least 6,000 cases in more than 40 di erent countries. Covid-19 loves ski resorts.
People drive or y in from all over Europe to crowded mountaintop villages. Queues
for lifts are packed. Changing rooms are explosions of sweat as panting bankers
heave themselves into salopettes. Bars are bacchanalian. Yodelling, an e cient way
to spread the virus, is not unheard of. As the rich partied in the Alps in March,
hospitals over owed in Lombardy, a few hundred miles away. No one wants to see
that again.

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Agreeing to write o the rst few weeks of the European ski season until the current
wave of the pandemic has passed ought to be uncontroversial. Yet it has triggered a
row. France, Germany and Italy all agreed to keep resorts shut until January. Austria
was a ronted. “We will not tell France when to reopen the Louvre,” harrumphed one
Austrian minister. Bavaria’s premier warned that anyone who crossed the border for
a few days on the slopes would face 10 days of quarantine on the way back. Austria
eventually acquiesced, e ectively banning skiing except for local day-trippers until
next year. It was, however, a revealing ght.

Europeans ski a lot. In total, they spend roughly 200m days a year skiing—about the
same as the rest of the world combined. Austria, France and America all rack up a
similar number of days on the piste, despite their vastly di erent populations.
Skiing is a quintessentially European invention. Its modern form started in
Scandinavia, before it was seized on by 19th-century adventurers. It was
commercialised across the Alps, after consumers found being pulled to the top of a

mountain a more pleasant experience than schlepping up on foot. Each nation

brings its own approach: pro cient Austrians are notorious for taking it seriously;
enthusiastic but terrible Dutch skiers much less so. It speaks to a certain ideal of
Europe, in which it is possible to wake up in France and lunch in Italy. All European
life is there at any resort—provided they can a ord €1,000-plus for a few days of
fun.

Skiing raises mountains of cash. During winter months it generates 4% of Austrian

gdp, according to ing, a bank. For comparison, Germany’s mighty car industry
makes up 5% of the country’s economy. This explains why Berlin’s demands that
Austria rope o the slopes for Christmas went down so badly. Imagine if the
Austrian chancellor had asked his German counterpart if she would mind
temporarily closing the car industry. (There is a climate crisis, after all, Angela.)

For a bloc that prides itself on dissolving borders, skiing is a knotty issue.
Mountains are immovable natural frontiers where questions of sovereignty are
heightened. Governments in the eu may have pooled sovereignty, but they jealously
guard what competences they do have, even if it only involves ski lifts. If resorts in
some countries lock down for health reasons, another government could scoop up
any spare revenue. Normally, eu regulations are supposed to stop such races to the
bottom. When it comes to skiing, the eu has no say. As far as o cials in Brussels are
concerned, that is a bullet dodged. In Europe’s delicate ecosystem, mountain
communities sit alongside farmers and shermen as near-untouchable endangered
species to be protected at all costs. Far better to let national politicians take the hit.

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After all, there will be a political cost. French resorts can only watch as their Swiss
peers—outside the eu and apparently free from any moral obligation not to shaft
their neighbours—stay open only a few hundred metres down the valley. Nicolas
Rubin, the mayor of Chatel, a resort on the French border, decked his town hall out
in Swiss ags in protest.
Those who want to keep on skiing have a point. Sliding down a hill with planks
attached to one’s feet is no riskier, in terms of catching coronavirus, than a cycling
trip. (Although bellowing “We’re headin’ for Venus/ And still we stand tall” into the
face of a Belgian stranger in a bar at 1,300 metres is another matter.)

Not going downhill

Whether families can squeeze in a skiing holiday during a pandemic is a decadent
debate—and a familiar one. A similar row erupted about whether to reopen the
continent for tourism over the summer. If the priority had been to eliminate the
virus, the answer would have been no. But Europeans could not bear the idea of
being stuck at home in August, so they packed their bags and zipped across the
continent. The consequences were predictable and predicted. Holidaymakers
spread the virus.

Every polity has sacred issues that make rationality leap out of the window. In
America, it is guns. In Britain, it is health care. In France, it is food. One such issue
is a constant across every European country: politicians muck about with holidays
at their peril. Whether consciously or not, a choice was made in the summer
between health and holidays. Holidays won. This time, at least, a more di cult
choice has been made. If resorts do fully reopen this season, the Austrian
government has decreed that the throbbing après-ski parties will be banned.
MooserWirt may have to wait until things are back to normal. When they are, expect
to nd a 71-year-old behind the decks. 7

Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today,
our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub

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 This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "To ski or not to ski?"

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