British media: China has discovered Winter Olympic talents from summer projects

British Reuters article on February 10, original title: China taps the potential of summer sports talents to compete for more Winter Olympic gold medals After being discovered by the national team "scouts" as a provincial youth long jump and triple jump champion, this week, 19-year-old Zhao Dan will swoop down from a winding track as a steel frame snowmobile athlete. The native Hohhot girl is one of the flag bearers of the Chinese delegation to the Beijing Winter Olympics and one of dozens of Chinese Olympians selected from other programs. China wants to become a sports powerhouse with the same strength of winter sports as summer sports.

Initially, like his worried parents, Zhao Dan was reluctant to participate in steel frame snowmobile training, after all, it was a little-known and dangerous sport. In the race, runners will lie prone on a snowmobile and race down the frozen track at nearly 130 kilometers per hour.

Of the 176 Chinese Winter Olympic athletes who participated in the Beijing Winter Olympics, about one-fifth were "crossover" athletes like Zhao Dan. China's achievements in winter sports have come mainly from speed skating, freestyle skiing and figure skating, but as the country has invested heavily in other winter sports, these athletes have become new players in some "new sports". Some of them come from areas with no winter sports traditions, such as Peng Qingyue, a ski jumper who used to engage in long jumping, from subtropical Yunnan, Du Jiani, a snowmobile who was transferred by a women's heptathlon, from Zhejiang, a snowmobile with a warm climate, and Ran Hongyun, a women's freestyle ski track runner, from the famous Henan Tagou Martial Arts School.

In March 2017, China's General Administration of Sport developed a goal-oriented plan to expand the country's winter sports talent pool to boost the country's performance at the 2022 Winter Olympics. Authorities search for talent across the country and conduct hundreds of selection competitions for tens of thousands of young athletes to test speed, skill and flexibility.

At the Winter Olympics, Chinese athletes will participate in 104 of the 109 events, of which 35 small events – including bobsleigh and women's steel frame bobsleigh – have achieved a "breakthrough of zero". In the pre-match trial pulley on Wednesday, Zhao Dan appeared confident, and she slid the fastest speed twice in six trial slides. (By Martin Quinn Prader, et al., translated by Cui Xiaodong)