In just a couple more days, the world’s attention turns to Vancouver for the Coca-Cola Panasonic General Electric McDonald’s Samsung Chevrolet XXI Winter Olympics, with plans, between commercial breaks, for sporting events.

Vancouver has a problem. Many sports require snow. It’s a fact. Ask anybody hanging from a tree halfway down a mountain side with a splintered rib cage, a hemorrhaging spleen and two long skinny boards strapped to his boots in July. Snow is both a performance and a safety requisite, and British Columbia, after one of its warmest Januarys ever, doesn’t have nearly enough.

The Vancouver Province reports that the Olympic ski and snowboard venue, Cypress Mountain, remains a green landscape this week while a fleet of tandem-trailer dumptrucks hauls in snow from the east, an eight-hour round trip for every load.

A much better solution is obvious here in Saskatchewan, and hardly an original idea on my part. Ever since last week’s Blizzard of the Century So Far XXI, I’ve lost count of the number of people who have mentioned to me, “Hey, Vancouver could sure use this snow!” or “Where do you get off shoveling your driveway into the street when nobody else does, jackass!” or — getting to point — “Bet you could write a real funny column, Page Five Boy, about Saskatchewan selling snow to the Vancouver Olympics.”

OK.

There.

That’s $20. I take your wager. I shall now write such a column and then we’ll see who’s laughing.

Snow, white gold, nature’s precious bounty from the skies above, winter wheat  — call it what you will, British Columbia needs it desperately and this February Saskatchewan has it. Supply meets demand.

Trick to any major commodity export is in the transport. Olympic snow needs to be moved quickly, east to west, in tremendous volumes. Vice-versa, west to east — the way of British Columbia’s traditional exports to Saskatchewan — is small and inefficient. Parking a 1991 Chev Astro van every June on a vacant lot off main street in Wadena to sell cherries out the back and piss off the Co-op is fine for the 68-year-old hippie orchard owner, but nobody from Saskatchewan ever saw a dime by loading up the grain truck for curbside sales of fresh plump wheat in Surrey. Ask Murray. Or Garth. Stupidest idea ever, they’ll tell you, and those boys have had some seriously lame brainstorms over the years.

To move that white stuff, we need Saskatchewan-style commodity shipping, and that means trains, every potash and grain car available.

Sure. Load them up, ship them west, bring them back empty, repeat. Saskatchewan has a century of experience in the routine, albeit mainly with eastward departures and rarely with cash receipts on the return, certainly not of the Olympic cost-overrun magnitude that promises to make us all filthy rich.

Vancouver ought to be first forewarned of traveling snow salesmen from climates warmer than ours. Oh, they are smooth, these scoundrels and charlatans, with their dazzling sales presentations that feature snowball fights and snowmen and adorable snowflakes all white and fluffy. Snow of that consistency has already turned, and is sure to spoil completely. Nothing puts a damper on preparations for the Olympic games like opening the chute on the latest train delivery of snow and out gushes a puddle. Only Saskatchewan’s snow undergoes a natural freeze-drying process that guarantees against decay until, sadly, late April. Harvested from the province’s vast pristine winter fields, Saskatchewan snow contains none of the nasty impurities found in rival brands, no highway salt, no corn, no smart cars.

And before VANOC organizing committee itself brings up the rather awkward question, let us not pussy-foot around the gravity issue. There’s a perfectly logical explanation for that video circulating of the Saskatchewan downhill ski team crouched, knees bent, jump-pushing off with both poles and then: nothing. It was an unusually calm day on the Prairies, with barely any tailwind. As any scientist knows, gravity is a form of potential energy gained through elevation. Those shipments across the Rockies will pump up the gravity content of Saskatchewan snow to levels at which Olympic alpine skiers, tested for performance-enhancing substances, will no longer be asked to pee into cups, but up into basketball hoops.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s no business like snow business, that this is no snow job, and that Saskatchewan helping out Vancouver is like money in the snow bank.  

See?

I even resorted to puns. I have nothing left.

You owe me twenty.

Ron Petrie is a humour columnist with the Regina Leader-Post.