Feature: Winter sports season about to burst into life in NW China

LANZHOU, China, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- Watching athletes skiing in the cold wind, Liu Pengfei, head of training and competition department of Gansu Winter Sports Management Center, instructed his boys and girls how to speed up on the track.

Liu and his athletes have been training at the Baiyin national snow sports training base in northwest China's Gansu Province since November. As snow has piled up on the tracks, winter sports season is coming in northwest China this December.

This national training base was built in late 2019, containing a skier service center with over 100 rooms, a 75,000-square meter ski resort, an indoor training hall and a biathlon field.

The local daytime temperature is about minus 15 degrees Celsius, while it drops 5-6 degrees further down after the sunset.

"The staff has begun to remove the snow and shaping the pistes with snow guns," said Liu, adding some of his athletes who were training in Jilin Province and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region are planning to come back to the base.

Lu Wen, an executive of the base, introduced that a nearly 3000m piste has been under building since the end of last month.

"As here come more athletes and tourists in the near future, we will make more pistes," said Lu, indicating that nearly 10 staff with four snow guns have been working day and night to shape the pistes in both biathlon field and the resort.

The Chinese paralympic cross-country skiing and biathlon teams had gathered at the base to prepare for the 2022 Beijing Winter Paralympic Games this January. And there were about 100,000 tourists who have enjoyed themselves in the public resort of the base last winter.

Experts believed that Beijing 2022 started a new era of China's snow sports.

Li Qiang, an executive in the scientific research department of China Tourism Academy, says that winter sports are booming in northwest China after the 2022 Winter Olympic Games.

Li indicated that winter sports facilities kept on upgraded this year throughout the country. "The growth of winter sports population shows a great potential of the industry in China," Li said. ■