Beijing is vigorously promoting ice and snow sports and plans to host the city’s first winter games by the end of 2018, Sun Xuecai, member of 13th Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) Beijing Committee and head of Beijing Municipal Bureau of Sports, said during the “Two Sessions” of Beijing recently.
By 2022, the number of the city’s population involved in ice and snow sports will increase to eight million. Sun introduced that each of the city’s 16 districts shall send a team to participate in the games to show their distinctive winter sports items.
At present, the city has set up 16 competitive ice and snow sports teams, basically covering all ice sports and some snow sports, according to Sun Xuecai. Adolescents are the key population for popularizing ice and snow sports and the city will further organize “ice and snow knowledge entering campus” activities to enable more students to learn the knowledge of ice and snow and Winter Olympics and experience ice and snow sports. For example, more than 700 youth ice hockey matches will be held, which is expected to attract more than 3,500 young hockey players, and the project of popularizing “roller skating to ice skating” will be launched in cooperation with the education commission to help more adolescents master the knowledge and skills of ice skating via roller skating.
Sun revealed that next the city will build ice and snow towns and a “Beijing and Zhangjiakou ice and snow tourism zone" and it will also increase the number of ice rinks within the city, requiring each district to build at least one ice rink with an effective area of no less than 1,800 square meters to facilitate citizens to experience ice sports.
