CHINA has opened Asia’s first year-round cross-country skiing tunnel as the country aims to introduce 300 million new participants to snow sports in connection with the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games.
The new Beishan All-Weather Cross-Country Ski Resort in northeast China’s Jilin Province features a 1,308-meters indoor ski run and a 1,616-m outdoor ski run.
It is reported to have cost 990 million yuan ($147 million) to construct.
The opening of the complex will enable Chinese athletes to practice cross-country skiing all year round, Liu Yijun, a snow sports official in Jilin City claimed, adding that athletes from Japan and South Korea were expected to use it for training this summer.
The facility will also be open to the public.
About 10 indoor snow tunnels for cross-country skiing have been built in Europe, mostly in Finland, Germany, Slovenia and Sweden.
A combined downhill and cross-country ski center is under construction in Norway and is due to open in January 2020.
Winter tourism has boomed in China since Beijing won its bid in 2015 to host the 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics.
The China Tourism Academy reported in February that the country was on track to reach the target of getting 300 million Chinese involved in winter sports.
It claimed 197 million people had taken part in winter tourism from November 2017 to March 2018.
Former ambassador has called on the Canadian Federal Government to consider expelling Chinese athletes who are training in the country for Beijing 2022 as a diplomatic row between the two countries spilled into the Olympic world.
Guy Saint-Jacques, the former Canadian ambassador to China, made the claim in an interview with broadcaster CBC this week.
The bitter row between Canada and China was sparked by the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of the founder of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, in Vancouver in December.
It followed an extradition request from authorities in the United States related to Iran sanctions violations.
Since then, tensions have escalated and China has sentenced two Canadian residents to death.
Robert Lloyd Schellenberg was jailed for 15 years in November for drug smuggling before a court in China upgraded the sentence to the death penalty.
Fan Wei was today given the same punishment for for producing and trafficking methamphetamine.
The rising tension has now led to Saint-Jacques suggesting Chinese athletes who have based their training camps and regimes in Canada, a nation with a rich Winter Olympic history, in preparation for Beijing 2022 should be sent home.
“The government has to take into account that, of course, any measure we will take will be looked at in Beijing and they will want to apply reciprocity, but again I think the course that has been pursued so far has not produced any result,” Saint-Jacques told CBC News Network’s Power & Politics program.
“I think we are at the stage where we have to be firm because this is the only language that China understands.”
It is not clear how many Chinese athletes are training in Canada.
China has attempted to tap into the expertise of other countries in a bid to improve their medal prospects at their home Winter Olympic Games in three years’ time.