Gears meshing for 2022 Winter Games

All infrastructure in progress, Beijing organizing committee announces

As the Olympic focus shifted from Pyeongchang to Beijing, the Chinese capital has ramped up work for a sustainable Winter Olympics in 2022, with the organizing committee announcing that the construction of all venues and infrastructure is well under way.

Carrying the Olympic flag from Pyeongchang in the Republic of Korea, Beijing wasted no time meshing the gears for 2022, using a blueprint that highlights sustainability and legacy.

Beijing will stage 102 events during the 2022 Games at 26 competition and noncompetition venues in its downtown area, in its northwestern Yanqing zone and in co-host city Zhangjiakou in Hebei province.

Among the 12 venues needed in the Beijing zone, 11 are existing facilities built for the Beijing 2008 Summer Games. They will be repurposed to host events such as ice hockey and curling, along with media and broadcasting functions.

"The reuse of the Beijing 2008 legacy is the highlight of our preparation for the 2022 Winter Games," said Chang Yu, director of the media and communications department of the Beijing 2022 organizing committee. "The transformation of those venues to adapt to winter sports will set an example for sustainable venue operation."

The design and construction of the Alpine skiing and sliding venues in Yanqing's Xiaohaituo Mountain area has passed the mandatory evaluation to minimize impact on the natural ecosystem, Chang said.

The construction of major infrastructure－including a new airport in southern Beijing, the Beijing-Zhangjiakou section of a high-speed railway and a number of expressways－has started, as parts of regional integration development plans across the Beijing-Hebei region.

The high-speed railway will reduce travel time between the Beijing and Zhangjiakou zones to 50 minutes from the current three-hour car ride.

"It is expected that everything will be ready before the test events in 2020," Chang said.

To maximize the positive influence of hosting the Olympics, China is pushing forward a national plan to involve 300 million people in winter sports, with all the 2022 facilities planned as a foundation to facilitate high-performance training, leisure activities and commercial operations.

Christophe Dubi, the International Olympic Committee's executive director of the Olympic Games, said Beijing is pushing ahead in a way future hosts should emulate.

The 2022 Games "are of great potential", Dubi told Xinhua News Agency in Pyeongchang. "I love the fact that those Games are very sustainable from the very beginning, and this is totally in line with the Olympic Agenda 2020."

In 2014, the IOC unveiled 40 reform proposals called Agenda 2020 which aim at cutting costs for future hosts and making the Games more sustainable and feasible.

"The main thing is the flexibility given to organizers to adapt the Games to their long-term development plans rather than to adapt the city to hosting the Games," Dubi said.

"When you are the organizers now ... you are doing it in a simpler and cheaper way."