Huo Cui (R) gives a hockey class to children. Lin Weihang
WITH the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, Shenzhen residents’ enthusiasm for ice-and-snow sports has been ignited. The city without real snow has seen an increasing number of residents having fun at ice skating rinks and ski slopes built across the city’s districts.
Following the curtains raised for the 2022 Beijing Games, the Longgang-based Shenzhen Kunlun Red Star, China’s first professional hockey club and key private sports company, ushered in a peak season.
Huo Cui, one of the club’s coaches, told Shenzhen Evening News that, “From the first day of the winter vacation, children came for hockey classes almost every day. We coaches took a break for just two to three days during the Spring Festival holiday. I am happy to see that the Winter Olympics have stimulated Chinese’s winter sports aspirations such as hockey.”
Dudu, one of Huo’s students, started learning hockey two years ago at age 6. His father told the News that Dudu was excited to watch competitions featuring the Chinese women’s hockey team as the national team recruited its members from Shenzhen Kunlun Red Star club.
Aside from hockey training, the club has launched “Hockey Month” to popularize winter sports in Shenzhen.
Public enthusiasm for ice-and-snow sports has gone hand-in-hand with the city’s large-scale construction of winter sports facilities.
Alps Snow World, located at the Window of the World theme park in Nanshan District, welcomed about 2,000 visitors per day during the Spring Festival holiday in 2021, said Zhang Zhifeng, vice manager of the large indoor ice-snow park.
“Since Alps Snow World opened in 2007, its revenue keeps growing. The park was upgraded by enlarging ice rinks in 2020,” Zhang said.
In Bao’an District, an ice-and-snow cultural and tourist project, which boasts a 100,000-square-meter complex, an 83-meter trail vertical drop, and six types of ski slopes, will be completed and open to the public in 2024.
As of October last year, around 346 million Chinese people, about a quarter of the country’s population, had gotten engaged in ice-and-snow sports since Beijing was awarded the right to host the Winter Olympic Games, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. (Shenzhen Daily)
