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Olympics meets old steel mill in symbolic makeover
People who had not visited Shougang Group’s old steel production complex in western Beijing would never have associated a steel maker with the Olympic Games.
The city organized media representatives from countries involved in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — the Eurasian political, economic and security organization founded in Shanghai — to visit the offices of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics organizing committee last month.
It’s been built in the former home of Shougang Group, the company having moved its iron and steel smelting operations to neighboring Hebei province.
As you entered the site, six silos once used to store raw materials, such as iron ore, came into view. Instead, the cement buildings now host the staff members of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.
Lyu Qin, deputy chief of the committee’s news publicity department, said in one of the silos that they took an eco-friendly approach when transforming the original plant and will consider recycling the industrial site after the Winter Olympic Games.
The transformation retained the original structures and framework of the steel-making facilities, including the six silos. It also used green technologies, such as photovoltaic power generation and rainwater collection.
Lyu said International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach highly praised the transformation on his inspection tour of the offices in August, saying it was a model fulfillment of the Beijing Winter Olympics’ vision, which adheres to green, sharing and open concepts.
Gui Lin, a representative from the committee’s general planning office, said the committee decided to move to the site because it wanted to achieve the 2022 Olympics’ two goals: sustainable development and hosting the event in a thrifty way.
The steel-making site will also play host to big air competitions in 2022. Big air, which made its Olympic debut at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, is the winter freestyle sport — involving snowboarding, skateboarding or skiing — in which competitors go down a hill or ramp and perform tricks after launching off very large jumps.
Gui said the venue would be the world’s first permanently preserved big air site and could be used for scientific research, training and games organized by the International Ski Federation.
Shirinov Zarobudin, a reporter from Tajikistan’s national information agency Khovar, said that building the committee’s offices and the big air facilities on the original steel-making site was a good move.
He said he would visit China again in 2022 to watch the Winter Olympics.