"Giant steps are what we take/walking on the moon"
("Walking On the Moon" by the Police)
The XX Winter Olympics have begun in Torino, Italy — which I always thought was called "Turin," by the way - are we now referring to the famous cloth as the "Shroud of Torino"? — and today skiers will be schussing, trekking, leaping, twisting, shooting, and otherwise communing with snow on horizontal planks as nordic combined, freestyle, biathlon, and ski jumping get underway in the Italian Alps.
But let's look to the future and a more distant potential Winter Olympic site, the moon. The moon's dust-covered slopes are a skier's paradise. There's plenty of powder, no wind, moguls and some seriously low-g gravity. With only 1/6th g holding them down, skiers and snowboarders can do tricks they only dreamed of doing on Earth, like say, an octuple-twisting quadruple backflip. Unlike when you're drunk, crashes really do happen in slow-motion on the moon, so wiping out is casual, bro.
According to NASA, the ideal place on the moon to hold a Winter Olympics is the lunar Alps, a range of mountains named after the European Alps, home to most of the modern Winter Games. The lunar Alps are similar to their terrestrial counterparts in height, breadth and spectacle.
The lunar Alps can be spotted using a small backyard telescope and NASA says this week is an excellent time to try. Train your telescope on the crater Plato, a conspicuous dark oval on the northern shore of Mare Imbrium, the "Sea of Rains." The Alps begin there and stretch around the rim of the Sea of Rains from Plato through the spectacular Alpine Valley to the towering lunar Mont Blanc. 
The Euro-Alps, which evolved over millions of years due to the motions of plate tectonics, stretches from France through Italy to Albania, and its the tallest peak is Mont Blanc, 15,700 ft high. The Alps of the moon were formed in an instant 4 billion years ago when an asteroid struck, blasting out the Sea of Rains, which is a crater not a "sea," and the lunar Alps are the "splash" from that impact.
Article comments
1 - Matthew T. Sussman
I am vehemently gainst Winter Olympics on the moon, because I don't think they could accomodate curling facilities.
2 - Eric Olsen
They are talking about building indoor facilities within the Plato crater. Housing and transportation -- always issues at Winter Games, which have to be where it's cold and mountainous and whatnot -- will doubtless being even more troublesome than usual.
3 - Dennis
what if in langlaufen someone misses the bullet and it goes and hits someone on teh earth...did they think of that?
4 - Eric Olsen
hmm - that would be quite a shot. The moon has gravity and an atmosphere, just much less than earth
5 - Scott Butki
What will this do to the biathlon?
WWCD? What will Cheney do?
6 - Mike
Um...it's Turin in English. Considering they call it Torino in Italy, where the city is located, I'd think that would be more correct.
Btw, lots of papers and tv stations kept Turin instead of going for the more marketable "Torino".