“It’s even worse than I thought”, a “hallucinating” photo, “I thought it was a montage”… Reactions multiplied on Twitter after the Big Air ordeal, which took place on Tuesday at the Beijing Winter Olympics. Internet users reacted to photos of the site of the ski competition. It shows the runway, with cooling towers and other industrial remains in the background.
These photos clearly show the ski slope, which is installed on a former steel production site. “Beijing’s Big Air Shougang is Courchevel in Chernobyl,” summarizes Aymeric Le Gall, our special correspondent for the Olympics.
The 60-meter-high track is set up beside a lake and next to four cooling towers in the Shijingshan district in the west of the Chinese capital, as seen seen on Google Earth. In the background, a Chinese temple can be seen in some photos. “Nothing goes together, it feels like a madmax scripted under acids, but in the end this great nonsense has something quite sexy about it, it is so incoherent, ”notes our special correspondent.
The steel factory, installed on the site since 1919, closed its doors at the end of 2010. In question, too much pollution for the capital, then explained the newspaper China Daily, quoting a dispatch from Xinhua, a state-run news agency. When it opened, the factory was located on the outskirts of Beijing. With the extension of the capital, it found itself surrounded by residential areas.
The construction of the ski slope took place from 2018 to 2019. A first competition took place there in December 2019. This track, which represents a technical challenge to hold snow in a non-mountainous area, must remain in operation after the Olympic Games, for skiing of course, but it could also be used for water skiing or grass jumping,
explain the organizers of the Olympics. This construction is part of the transformation of the west of the capital, they continue, while other sports sites of primary importance are already nearby.
It is not only in Beijing that ski sites have been set up in former industrial areas: in Nœux-les-Mines, in the Pas de Calais, it is possible to ski on a synthetic track set up on a former heap.