Winter Olympics: China to turn steel-mill ski jump into a giant water slide, as hosts look to repurpose Games venues
- The Shougang Big Air ski jump, built on the site of a decommissioned steel mill, has been the most talked-about venue
- Organisers are looking at ways it can be used in the off-season when it isn’t being used to train next generation of stars
The Shougang Big Air ski jump, built on the site of a decommissioned steel mill, has been the most talked-about venue of the Winter Olympics. While there’s been praise, it has also been criticised as dystopian and dreary. Beijing hopes not to add white elephant to that list as well.
To keep the structure viable after the closing ceremony on Sunday evening, China plans to use it to train the next generation of Winter Olympic athletes, many of whom might have been inspired by watching Team China stars Eileen Gu and Su Yiming win gold there. But that’s when the weather is cold.
In the summer, the city plans to turn it into a very large water slide. Alternatively, according to the organising committee for the Beijing Olympics, it could also be covered with turf and used for grass sledding.
Whether these plans are innovative or far-fetched, they highlight a problem that has long dogged Olympic host cities: what to do with the bespoke venues once the Games end. Watching multimillion-dollar facilities fall into disuse has fuelled public opposition in many countries to bidding for the games.
“There are definitely challenges with any kind of reuse project,” said David Fannon, an associate professor of architecture at Northeastern University who has written about how to make structures more adaptable. “And then especially with what is probably a pretty unique one,” he said of the plans for the Shougang Big Air jump.
The International Olympic Committee has tried to address its critics. In 2018, the IOC adopted sweeping reforms to how it selects host cities, including loosening its requirements for venues. As a result, 80 per cent of the proposed facilities for the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games in Italy, the first determined by this process, will be either existing or temporary structures.
About 60 per cent of the venues for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang and Beijing 2022 were existing or temporary, according to the IOC.