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(Sports Focus) China's skiing fever calls for standardized training system

Xinhua, December 11, 2015 Adjust font size:

China's skiing fever ignited by the successful bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics is facing a bottleneck of lacking a standardized training system, the qualified instructors in particular.

   The huge gap between the fast-growing number of fans and the shortage of experienced tutors led the ski training market to a mess.

   Wang Chunlu, the secretary general of the Chinese ski association, told Xinhua on Friday that China has nearly 8,000 certified ski instructors, which are far lag behind the growing demands.

   "Many uncetified ski instructors at many ski resorts only have one-week skiing experience before they start to teach others, which may cause troubles," Wang said. "The huge demand urges China to set up its own ski training system, which may be introduced from abroad in the near future."

   Hao Shihua, a former alpine skier of China's national team, also believes that the ski in China, along with its training system, is just at the primary stage.

   "So far, the ski industry in China is out of order. As the market is growing so fast that the unexperienced people do not know how to make it better," Hao added.

   Hao observed that some ski instructors were reluctant to teach more in one tutor period in a bid to make more money from more periods.

   Hao is running a ski training center in Chongli, which will host the cross-country, freestyle and other skiing events during the 2022 Winter Olympics.

   "I want to change the situation. It's a marketing strategy," Hao said.

   Three years ago, Hao established Flower Ski, a ski training center focusing on providing a set of standardized services and developing teaching methods .

   A five-day training camp is one of her ideas.

   "In order to form a training system for ski skills, we promote the five-day training program, which just fills the blank in ski resorts from Monday to Friday, to meet the demand for deep learning from those fans," Hao said.

   Meanwhile, as the first officially certified training base for ski instructors in China, Flower Ski started to give lessons to instructors from several local ski resorts. Until now, over 500 instructors have passed the national certification test here.

   As to the Winter Olympics, Hao is ambitious to create a leading brand of ski training in China, though she believes that there is a long way to go.  Endi