This thought occurred to me last week as news broke that the Government of British Columbia would not support a bid by Vancouver to stage the 2030 edition of the event.

This served to remind me that both Salt Lake City and Sapporo, now thought to be the likeliest winners of the race, have already staged the Games - as, of course, had Vancouver, and as has Alberta, whose Minister of Culture said recently that the Canadian province was "open to" hosting the 2030 event.

As things stand, the earliest Winter Olympics for which a newbie host might conceivably be chosen looks to be 2038.

Cortina d’Ampezzo, co-host of the next Winter Games in 2026, staged the 1956 event.

Sapporo in northern Japan, now viewed as frontrunner for 2030, held the Games in 1972.

Salt Lake City, which would be hot favourite for 2034 if Sapporo did get the nod for eight years' time, was host in 2002.

Two factors in particular appear to have been militating against the emergence of possible brand new Winter Olympic Host Cities.

One is global warming.

If you are going to provide the long list of facilities necessary to stage a Winter Olympics in the 21st century, you probably want to be as sure as possible that there will be good demand to use these facilities for between 30 and 50 years after the circus has moved on.

With temperatures rising, any such assessment would have to take into account not only narrow questions of supply and demand, but whether new venues could be assured of adequate quantities of the critical raw material of snow throughout a worthwhile season for decades into the future.

As long ago as 2018, research reported on by the New York Times was said to be suggesting that by "midcentury", nine of the 21 headline Winter Olympic hosts since 1924 might not be reliably cold enough for the Games.

The other potential deterrent factor for new hosts is the cost of the facilities, some quite specialised, that you will need to supply.

Some cities, as with the Summer Olympics, might take the view that the massive surge of mainly positive publicity that the Games will bring helps to make such expenditure worthwhile.

This is a respectable argument, but with large swaths of the globe, which rarely if ever see snow and ice, more or less indifferent to winter sports, the boost is unlikely to be as valuable as that from the Summer Games - especially with top-class football providing ever more formidable competition for eyeballs for the Olympics or any other entertainment format throughout the European winter.

In any case, with the Olympic world having set its mind against unnecessary new-build, to a greater degree than at any time hitherto, it is always likely to make more sense financially to re-use sports, and to some extent general, infrastructure that has already been utilised for one Winter Olympics.

If there are to be future new Winter Games hosts after Beijing, where might they be located?

Somewhat ironically, China is probably one of the more plausible answers to this question, not least because the country carries the sort of heavy-duty political muscle you might need to draw on to make it happen.

Sooner or later you would think well-off Sweden might produce a bid strong enough to prevail.

Some of the ex-Soviet countries in frigid Central Asia would also be on my list of "possibles" - Almaty, after all, is a recent bidder.

However, this would probably be contingent on hydrocarbon production remaining as lucrative a source of export earnings as it has been for the past 50 or so years.

While I am not going to rule that out, there is equally plenty to suggest that the post-oil era is finally drawing closer.

I also think it possible that, to prevent white elephants, the geographic spread of future Winter Games may become more and more scattered, with organisers seeking to use the best facilities for different sports almost irrespective of where they are.

To the screen-based viewers who make up the bulk of the audience, it makes little difference whether the sliding, skiing and skating venues are a few hundred metres or a few hundred kilometres apart.

The other looming mid-to-long-term issue for the Winter Olympics, and for winter sports in general, is of course that, if global temperatures continue to rise, the areas experiencing snow and ice for months on end will shrink, probably prompting both the number of skilled young winter sports exponents and general interest in their exploits to shrink too.

It is very much in the winter sports industry’s interests to lobby as hard as possible for meaningful action to slow, and if possible for a time reverse, the rate at which our planet is getting warmer.