Shortly after Christmas, Tom Johnston, a soft-spoken Wyoming cowboy, will leave his sprawling ranch, saying goodbye to his wife, his cows and his quiet, solitary life. He’ll make the 20-hour trek to South Korea, where he’ll spent the next two months caring for a mountain, tending to its curves and its bumps.
Johnston is a snow guru and is tasked with readying the Alpine racecourse at the Pyeongchang Olympics, a simplistically complicated job that means Johnston is essential but far from the spotlight. He carries the nondescript title “chief of race for ski events” and has been prepping for the Winter Games for more than two years. These next two months, he figures to spend every day, from sunup until past sundown, making sure every inch of the course is fully prepared for the world’s best skiers.
“You just go as hard as you can and look at every little spot that isn’t perfect,” he said. “My hayfields are the same way — I want them to be perfect.”
The job isn’t moving snow to and fro. It’s bringing the mountain to life. The Pyeongchang course was designed by Bernhard Russi, who was an Olympic gold medalist in the downhill at the 1972 Games. Johnston was essentially given a blueprint and charged with molding the terrain and crafting the jumps.
The key is the snow, and the job is more of a scientific undertaking than a snow-shoveling chore.
“Tommy is a magician with snow,” said Steven Nyman, the American skier and three-time Olympian.
Johnston, 55, laughs at the suggestion, but the skiers on the World Cup circuit know the difference between a course that Johnston tended and all the others.
“He knows how to put in the time it takes to make the snow good. There’s no excuses with him,” said skier Travis Ganong. “He just makes it happen no matter what. That’s why he’s the best in the business. Every course he’s always done, it’s way better than everywhere else we go.”
While Johnston will use a team of helpers and a fleet of large snowcats to move snow around, the challenge is understanding the snow at a molecular level and the weather. He wants a course that’s fast but not dangerous, which requires constant supervision and attention to the smallest details.
“The crystal structures in the snow, you look at it and think, ‘Can I change that?’” he explained. “‘Will adding water make it worse? If I use a snowcat on it, will it make it better? Are the nights cold? Will the sky be open or closed? What’s the humidity?’”
Snowflakes might look like perfect crystals under a microscope, but they can make for lousy puzzle pieces. Johnston prefers cold conditions with the perfect amount of moisture. He wants snow that sticks, that’s malleable, that can be moved.
Then there’s this: One of the world’s authorities on snow also happens to hate when it snows.
“I don’t like natural snow. You can’t control it,” he said, noting he prefers the man-made variety that can be blasted out of guns positioned all along his racecourses.
“You got to build a course that’s durable. You got to guarantee the product,” he continued. “If it falls apart, then they hate you. But they seem to hate you less if it’s icy.”
Johnston is an English major from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. He took up skiing as a child and raced throughout high school and college. He started coaching after college, which is how he got started crafting the courses and preparing the snow, eventually serving as the chief of race at Jackson Hole, Wyo.
The TV cameras might not capture the subtleties of the mountain, but the racers certainly notice. While both the men and women will race on the same course in Pyeongchang, four years ago at the Sochi Games, Johnston was only responsible for the women’s course.
“We were looking at that, like, ‘Oh, man!’ and then our hill was just a sheet of ice,” Nyman said. “It was so gnarly. We were like, I wish Tommy was preparing our hill. But he’s doing this one for the Olympics, and it’s going to be fantastic. I’m pretty fired up.”