By Zhang Rongfeng
BEIJING, May 5 (Xinhua) -- China has seen a 16 percent increase of skiing visits, amounting to 17.5 million in 2017-18 snow season, according to the white book of skiing industry in China.
As the Winter Olympics comes to the Beijing 2022 period, the winter sports are booming in the country, especially among the mass. China has a total of 703 ski resorts operating currently, 57 more than 2016-17 snow season, mainly located in Northeast China, North China and Northwest China, where there are relatively sufficient snowfall and favored weather conditions for skiing.
Most of the ski resorts in China have witnessed an upsurge of visits over the last few years. Zhaojin ski resort in Tongchuan, Shannxi province, is one of them.
"The Zhaojin ski resort has come through 'triple jumps' since it went into operation on January 15, 2015. It had welcome visits of 36,949 in the opening season. The total visits reached 55,194 in 2016-17 season and it then rose to 77,055 the last snow season," said Zou Jun, deputy director of Shannxi sports bureau, on Saturday.
In order to encourage more Chinese to have access to snow and ice sports, local governments have built thousands of tentative sites all across China for fun-oriented snow and ice sports, attracting millions of participants last winter.
Beijing has organized "Happy Ice & Winter Season" for citizens for four straight years since 2014, which had drawn more than 5.02 million visits in 2017-18 season to its 22 ski resorts, dozens of outdoor and indoor ice rinks, and 37 recreational snow sites.
Local governments have also been taking initiatives to pave the way for the public's involvement in winter sports. Beijing, as the co-host city of 2022 Winter Olympics, has been setting up training bases of skiing for mass fitness and trained a total of 5,905 community sports instructors for skiing and skating in 2017.
China's lucrative sports lottery has provided strong financial support for winter sports sites construction all across the country, many of which are opened free to the public. Beijing newly built an outdoor refrigerated rink covering 900 square meters and two outdoor simply-constructed rinks last year, all financed by the lottery.
Businesses related to winter sports has been expanding in China as well with 1,420 more snowguns being added to the overall tally of 6,600 used in the country's ski arenas last snow season, according to information from the white book. Besides, these resorts have added more than 50,000 pairs of skis a season in order to meet the increasing rental need.
"We have a sale of 6,000 pairs of ice skate and blade last snow season (2017-18), nearly tripling that of the season before. I can feel the pace of mass participation in snow and ice sports in China," said Wang Yang, the founder of Changchun Pennington Sports Equipment company based in Changchun, capital of Jilin province.
"As far as I know, the municipal government in Qitaihe, Heilongjiang province, earmarked hundreds of thousands yuan last year to purchase the skating equipment and provided that to the local primary schools for free. It's about 200 pairs of ice skates allocated to each school," added Wang.
The rapid growth of skiing industry has also absorbed the influx of professional personnel in the field. There has been over 20,000 persons working as skiing instructors by the end of 2017 in China, many of them hold certificates from America's PSIA, Canada's CSIA and New Zealand's NZSIA.
In the past years, China has expressed the ambition to encourage around 300 million people, over 1/5 of the country's population, to participate in snow and ice sports, especially after winning the bid of 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
China has been striving to break the confine of winter sports in the north by promoting skating in the sub-tropical and tropical south with more and more indoor ice arenas being set up in the region. People can even find many rinks in the shopping malls in Haikou, capital city of Hainan, China's southmost province, and "Ice & Snow World" in Sanya.
"It's a surprise to me seeing so many skating rinks and so many local residents falling in love with skating in Haikou and Sanya," said Li Yan, head coach of Chinese skating team.
"If some athletes from China's southmost province Hainan compete on the international skiing and skating stage representing China some day, I won't be as surprised as now."
Chinese fans for winter sports have been snowballing as more and more relevant events are taking place in the country with NHL China game, China Cup figure skating GP, ISF snowboarding WC being hosted in China last winter.
Beijing now has the largest youth hockey tournament in Asia with 2,554 players from 162 teams competing in the 2017-18 youth hockey club league.
Ice and snow themed tourism is getting hotter and hotter in China. The ice & snow festival last winter in Changchun, which had lasted three months, had turned out a revenue of 16 billion yuan RMB (2.5 billion U.S. dollars), in accordance with the information published this week from cntgol.com, the national tourism service website.
