Alpine acclaim for Games' ski 'paradise'

With perfectly manicured artificial snow covering challenging yet fun terrain, designers and athletes have hailed Beijing 2022's National Alpine Skiing Center as a "paradise "for elite racers.

Built on Xiaohaituo Mountain in Beijing's Yanqing district, and featuring a vertical drop of over 900 meters, the center has earned positive reviews from Olympians for its sophisticated design and high-quality man-made snow, despite limited access to the courses in the build-up to the Games due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Designer Bernhard Russi, a former downhill Olympic champion (1972), is confident the snow quality will allow the world's top daredevils to push their limits.

"What I can tell you is that the snow we have right now on the courses is absolutely perfect. You can not have it better," Russi, chairman of the International Ski Federation's Alpine committee, said at a news briefing at the Main Media Center on Saturday.

"I think for the ski racers, it's just like paradise. They can do whatever they want. It's beautiful for skiing," said the Swiss expert, who has designed nine out of the 10 Alpine courses for the Winter Olympics since the 1988 Games in Calgary, Canada.

"The feedback from the athletes is that the snow, the course, is quite easy to ski... you can make the turn wherever you want. That means compliments to the snowmakers."

Although having part of their pre-race training sessions canceled due to strong winds on Saturday, most skiers heaped praise on the course after going for a trial run.

"I really enjoyed skiing today. The snow here is fantastic, you can do whatever you want to do. You can just ski clean," said Norwegian skier Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, a three-time Olympian, after two training runs.

"It's a downhill with good flow and jumps and what we like. The overall picture of it is cool, different but fun to ski."

Ever since Beijing was awarded hosting rights for the 2022 Winter Olympics in 2015, concerns have been raised by some media and observers over China's lack of expertise in building and managing Alpine venues.

With the first official race－men's downhill－presenting the course to an international audience on Monday, the efforts of Russi and a dedicated team of Chinese organizers over the past seven years are also deserving of a gold medal to silence the skeptics.

"Coming into it, I think we were a little bit concerned, we were like 'Oh, it doesn't snow here often, it's all man-made snow'. But it's great, the snow surface is perfect really. There were probably 12 of us training like six runs and there wasn't a dent in the track," said American skier AJ Hurt.

Having first visited China in 2014 before Beijing officially submitted its bid, Russi has spent seven years analyzing the terrain in Yanqing in order to sculpt the slopes in the northwestern Beijing suburbs into a world-class course worthy of Alpine skiing's best and to deliver a visual thrill for millions of viewers.

The prospect of the Alpine center continuing to host more FIS-level events and to develop into a popular resort in the sport's burgeoning new market is appealing to top athletes, such as Norwegian Kjetil Jansrud, the 2014 Olympic champion in men's super-G.

"Looking at it from the athlete's perspective and the love of skiing, I think having built such a fantastic venue and now with opportunities for skiing to continue here for many years, it's a great thing," said Jansrud.

"When we travel around now with the sport, it's usually on the old hills that have histories, if not to say hundreds of years back. If Alpine skiing is going to survive and get its spot in Asia as well, this is a venue that really speaks for that future. It's amazing."

Citing the density and consistency of surface needed on the piste for athletes to compete as fairly as possible, Russi claimed that the use of artificial snow represents the future of Alpine events at the Olympics and other world-class meets.

"This is nothing new. Already in the past, I would say five to 10 years, we have been skiing only on man-made snow," said the 73-year-old.

"In order to have a perfect course for Alpine racing you need man-made snow to get the right quality, the compact snow for the power which these racers are able to put down on the snow.

"As I said before, the best snow for Alpine racing today is the man-made snow."

As a decades-long practice adopted internationally, the use of man-made snow has proved a more efficient and reliable alternative to the natural form to shape courses for almost all skiing and snowboarding disciplines, according to Wei Qinghua, mountain operation manager at the Guyangshu venue cluster in Chongli, a district of Games co-host Zhangjiakou, Hebei province.

The use of an advanced, smart snowmaking system, supported by an efficient water-recycling project deployed at Beijing 2022 venues, renders concerns over man-made snow's environmental impact almost redundant, said Wei.

"The snowmaking system has an automatic control, which takes the humidity, temperature and other factors into consideration to improve the conversion ratio from water to snow and improve our efficiency of water use," said Wei, who has over 20 years' experience in the region's ski industry.

"The source of water we used for snowmaking only comes from rainfall and also the surface runoff. For all the three venues here we planned to use 390,000 tons of water for snowmaking, which is less than 1 percent of the water reserve in Chongli."