Heard the one about the Winter Olympics that didn't have any snow? If anything sums up the bemusement over China's controversial £2.5 billion Games that begin in a little under three weeks, perhaps it is the absence of the one element central to the event.
One telling statistic is that between January and March last year, the competition venue at the National Alpine Ski Centre in Yanqing, roughly 50 miles north-west of the capital, Beijing, had just 2cm of snow, less than London – or Madrid.
And pictures of the venues tell their own story. The new national ski-jumping centre is certainly impressive – but sits incongruously in a barren landscape of dirty brown hills. It's hardly alpine.
The National Ski Jumping Centre, a venue of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, in Zhangjiakou, Hebei province, China pictured in November last year
Yanqing Alpine Skiing Centre, roughly 50 miles north-west of the capital, Beijing, earlier this month. The venue had just 2cm of snow between January and March last year
As for the snowboarding slope, it has been built in the heart of the city's concrete-clad industrial area, overlooked by the massive former cooling towers of an old steel mill.
Dubious decisions by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in awarding the Games are nothing new.
Nor is artificial snow, which has often been used to top up slopes since the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York State.
For the 2014 Games in the subtropical Russian resort of Sochi, 80 per cent of the snow was fake.
But Yanqing, which hosts the alpine skiing, bobsleigh, luge and skeleton, will take the phoney white stuff to new
