Yearender: Beijing's preparation for 2022 Winter Olympics off to a strong start

Beijing has wasted no time during the one and a half years since it won its bid to host the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games along with Zhangjiakou in July, 2015.

The Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2022 Games, which was launched last December, said in its annual report released last week that preparation work is on the right track and will be sped up next year.

Beijing's work has been recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The IOC Coordination Commission held talks with the Beijing 2022 Organizing Committee and visited several venues during their first meeting in Beijing in October, and said they were pleased with Beijing's preparation. The IOC also praised the sustainability of Beijing's work, saying it illustrated the vision of the Olympic Agenda 2020.

The preparation work for Beijing 2022 has taken full advantage of the legacy of the Beijing 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Games - including repurposing existing competition venues, other infrastructure and drawing on the experience of professionals with deep operational experience.

According to the Beijing Organizing Committee, venue construction will be started in 2017 and completed by 2019, and all the venues will be ready for test events in 2020.

There will be a total of 25 competition and noncompetition venues for Beijing 2022. Twelve venues are in Beijing, among which 11 are legacies of the 2008 Olympic Games. The only new venue in Beijing will be the speed skating venue.

The conceptual design of the speed skating venue has been opened to international bidding and the final design will be selected soon. The construction will get underway next April.

The alpine ski competition will be held in Yanqing. Most of the courses for this event have been selected this year. Also in Chongli, the Gent Resort Secret Garden has built an Olympic standard half-pipe. Gent is the training base for the Chinese national half-pipe ski and snowboard teams, and will host the FIS Freestyle and Snowboard World Championships in 2021 as test events for the Olympic Games.

Major transportation projects are also under construction. construction began on the new Beijing-Zhangjiakou high-speed railway in April, and is expected to be finished by the end of 2019. The new railway will link Beijing's Yanqing district and Chongli county in Zhangjiakou.

The new railway will boast a top speed of 350 kilometers per hour, and will take less than one hour to travel from Beijing to Zhangjiakou.

The construction of the Yanchong Expressway will be started by the end of this year and is expected to be completed in 2019.

According to the Beijing Organizing Committee, the emblem for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games will be unveiled in the second half of 2017, and marketing development will be underway soon.

The Beijing Organizing Committee will launch first tier sponsorship recruitment in early 2017, and tier two in 2018. Exclusive sponsorship recruitment will start in 2019.

Beijing has also put forth an effort to encourage participation in winter sports, as China has vowed to encourage 300 million people in China to take up winter sports ahead of the 2022 Games.

Beijing itself aims to attract as many as five million residents to take up winter sports by 2020. Last month, the Beijing municipal government approved a five-year (2016-2020) plan on public fitness, pledging "vigorous efforts" to introduce all sorts of winter sports to the public including alpine skiing, speed skating, figure skating and curling.

According to the plan, the government will use sports lottery revenue and other fiscal funds to build sporting venues, set up sports associations, and organize competitions and festivals.

China's General Administration of Sport also released a plan in November to speed up the construction of winter sports infrastructure, aiming to build at least 500 skating rinks before the 2022 Winter Olympic Games.

The plan calls for 650 skating gyms, 500 of which will be built in five years, and 800 skiing resorts across the country.

At the 128th IOC Session in Kuala Lumpur last July, Beijing, along with Zhangjiakou in Hebei Province, beat Kazakhstan's Almaty to win its bid to co-host the 2022 Winter Olympics. Beijing will become the first city in the world to host both the Summer and Winter Olympic Games. Endit