BEIJING, Feb. 6 -- Although winter vacation has come, 11-year-old Wang Aoyun still goes to school every day, for skating.
As school athletes, Wang and 20-plus teammates practice speed skating on a cornfield-turned ice rink at Taipingzhuang central school in Beijing's Yanqing District.
In three years, the 2022 Winter Olympics will be held in Beijing and Zhangjiakou, Hebei Province.
While construction of stadiums and infrastructure projects has been accelerated, winter sports and the related economy at the venues have also been heating up.
With its ice rink built in 2016, Taipingzhuang school is the first that had an ice rink in Yanqing District, where competitions of alpine skiing, bobsled, skeleton, and luge will be held in 2022.
Teachers take shifts to water the ice rink every night in winter, said Ding Jianpei, principal of the school.
"Most of our students may not be engaged in winter sports in the future, but we think it's worth it if they feel the happiness in the sports," Ding said.
Winter sports used to be a luxury 20 years ago in Beijing. People had to travel hundreds of miles to find a ski slope. The first large ski resort in the Chinese capital, Shijinglong, was not open until the late 1990s, in Yanqing.
Local villager Guo Junhua, 35, was among the first batch of ski lovers. Last year, she quit her job as a ski coach in southwest China and opened a ski training school in Yanqing District. To date, she has trained 50 children.
【国内英语资讯:China Focus: 2022 Olympics preparation warms up winter sports, economy】相关文章:
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