Will China Be Ready for Its Next Olympic Moment?

On February 13, Liu Jiayu won China’s first medal of the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics, earning silver in the women’s snowboard halfpipe.

“This sport in China is going to grow,” Liu predicted afterward in an interview with Xinhua. “For Chinese people having someone on the podium for the Olympics is an honor. It will be a huge push for Chinese snowboard.”

China’s government certainly hopes so. The country is set to host its first Winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022, and Liu’s medal represents the first – and only – medal ever for a Chinese snowboarder. But perhaps that’s not surprising, given that China only added the sport to its national slate in 2003.

China’s late embrace of snowboarding echoes an issue Beijing is hoping to solve in the run-up to the 2022 games: winter sports just aren’t that popular in China.

In 2014, Beijing beat out the only other contender, Almaty in Kazakhstan, to secure the rights to host the 2022 Winter Olympics – despite the fact that the Beijing region receives very little snow, meaning the skiing and snowboarding events will have to make do with entirely artificial powder. Part of why China won the nod over Kazakhstan was capacity (Beijing has already proven itself capable with the 2008 Summer Olympics, while Almaty’s ability to host a mega sporting event was questioned). But the International Olympic Committee may also have been enticed by Beijing’s promise that a Chinese Winter Games would bring a boom of interest in winter sports to the world’s most populous country.

However, if the promised wave of interest – and implied increase in athletic prowess – doesn’t materialize, China could wind up with an embarrassingly small medal haul on its home turf.

If that is the way things unfold, it will mean “China spends big money setting up the stage, and the performers are all foreigners,” Liu Bo, a former trainer for China’s national ski teams, told Reuters. “President Xi will not allow this to happen. We have to be the leading actor in 2022.”

China being the “leading actor” in terms of medals at the Winter Games seems unlikely, even if China can boost both the number of athletes and the number of medals. The national team simply has a long way to go to catch up with perennial winter powerhouses like Norway, Russia, the United States, and Germany.

For starters, China’s national team for the PyeongChang Olympics consisted of only 81 athletes. The United States, by comparison, had the largest delegation with 242 athletes. Even Russia, which was barred from officially participating at the PyeongChang Olympics and had many athletes disqualified over a doping scandal, more than doubled China’s delegation, with 169 “Olympic Athletes from Russia” competing in the games.

China is far more interested in – and competitive at – the Summer Olympics. It sent 405 athletes, the third-most of any country, to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The differing level of enthusiasm is reflected in the medal totals: China won nine medals in PyeongChang versus 70 in Rio. Over time, China has bagged nearly nine times as many medals at Summer Olympics (546) as it has at Winter Olympics (62). By comparison, Norway topped the medal charts at PyeongChang with 39. The United States, in what was considered a disappointing result, had as many golds as China’s total medal count.

Since it began competing in 1980, China has won medals in only six out of 15 sports at the Winter Games: snowboarding (thanks to Liu’s silver), short track speed skating (the source of China’s only gold at PyeongChang), speed skating, freestyle skiing, figure skating, and curling.

In an effort to boost these figures ahead of 2022, the Chinese government came up with a plan, released in two documents: the Promotion Plan of Mass Winter Sports and National Construction Plan of Winter Sports Infrastructure (2016-22). As the names imply, the plans call for both a boost in athletic participation rates (and thus, China hopes, athletic success) and the construction of physical infrastructure necessary for winter sports: ski and snowboarding slopes, ice skating rinks, and bobsledding runs, among others.

China is seeing some success already, particularly when it comes to skiing. Over 50 winter sports schools have been set up in Beijing; the government is also pushing regular schools to arrange skiing lessons for their students. Government support has also led to a boom in the construction of ski resorts, with the total number of resorts jumping by double digits from 2014 until 2017, when growth fell to a still heady 8.8 percent year-on-year.

Across the country, visits to Chinese ski resorts rose 15.9 percent year-on-year in 2017, totaling 17.5 million. About 80 percent of those were first-time skiers, which suggests massive potential for growth. The flipside, however, is the concern is that these new skiers will effectively be one-and-done, having tried the sport only for the novelty.

The boom brings other issues, as well. China’s north – where temperatures are most fitting for winter sports – is also the driest area of the country, meaning these resorts (and their fake snow) are taxing local water reserves. Plus, the fact that China must manufacture nearly all the snow at its ski resorts means none of them are considered world class, compared to, say, the slopes found in the Rocky Mountains in North America, the Alps in Europe, or even in neighboring Japan, considered the best ski destination in Asia.

Skiing isn’t the only focus of China’s sports aspirations; ice hockey is another. Here too there has been notable progress: Song Andong became the first Chinese player drafted by the U.S. National Hockey League in 2015 and Beijing added its own team, the Kunlun Red Stars, to Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League in 2016. Tellingly, however, much of China’s young hockey talent lives overseas, and is largely being groomed in North American high schools and junior leagues.

There’s even state sponsorship to boost China’s curling hopes, with government funds letting athletes train full-time (by contrast, all of the U.S. Olympic curlers at PyeongChang have day jobs, either full- or part-time). That state support has only translated to a single medal in the sport, though – a bronze in women’s curling in 2010.

Ultimately, China wants to boost the size of its national winter sports industry from around 400 billion RMB ($63 billion) in 2017 to 600 billion RMB ($95 billion) by 2020, and 1 trillion ($158 billion) by 2022. Securing investment will be easy, especially when the government can pitch in directly or indirectly nudge private business to step up. The harder part will be reaching China’s stated goal of having 50 million people take up winter sports by 2025 (the more often cited 300 million figure actually includes not only athletes, but also those who attend winter sporting events as audience members or volunteers). Harder still will be translating sheer numbers into medals in sports unfamiliar to most Chinese even a few years ago.

If these efforts fall short Beijing will face an embarrassing result at what is likely to be the sole global sporting event China will host during Xi Jinping’s time as top leader.