The cancellation of test events because of the pandemic has prevented the number of athletes from discovering the new slopes. The obligings to be very creative
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Before landing in Beijing for the winter games, from 4 to 20 February, Alexis Pinturault saw the track that hosts the Olympic alpine ski events through a video, gleaned “on the Internet” . Perrine Laffont is about to defend his bumps ski title at Zhangjiakou’s Genting Snow Park, that she could only apprehend thanks to a simple photography. “Not very representative”, concedes the Ariège. Antoine Adelisse was more lucky: the freestyleur was able to test the springboard of Shougang, where the first Big Air Skiing Olympic events will take place in … December 2019.
The Pandemic of Covid-19 disrupted the preparation of athletes. In particular because of the cancellation of many tests tests, these appointments allowing competitors to discover in real conditions infrastructure. It took a hundred days before the opening ceremony so that foreign sportsmen and their frames could go to China and reach the sites where the Grand Mass of Snow and Ice Sports will take place.
Radical measurements
At the end of November 2021, Skicross and SnowboardCross specialists launched their season in Zhangjiakou, station that will host the events. A month earlier, the Boblers had been able to discover the National Glass Center of Yanqing and proceed with some descents. Sign of the importance of this first test in real conditions: Only the Chinese hitch had pointed out, so as not to reveal its lines to its opponents.
“This is a new track, it was essential to discover it to work the trajectories, to be able to adapt the material”, explains the manager of the teams of France descent disciplines, Alexandre Vanhoutte.
China, where the first cases of COVID-19, at the end of 2019, have almost eradicated the contagion at the price of radical measurements. And if Beijing has risen in the tests tests the two weeks of isolation imposed on foreign nationals arriving in the country, they had to live completely isolated from the rest of the population.
Between the resumption of the official season and, in some cases, an Olympic quota remaining to validate, some athletes, however, preferred to impleat on a Chinese stopover upstream of the competition. For them, on-site conditions remain an interrogation.
A giant fan
“Usually, we can adapt the preparation during the summer to such climb that looks like the play track, summarizes the French biathlete Simon Desthieux. There we have nothing of all.” It had to be composed With the rare known elements: the absence of snow – at Yanqing, where the alpine ski should take place, it falls on average five centimeters of snow per year – the risk of glacial temperatures and altitude.
Foreign competitors have been able to count on the returns of their compatriots, recruited by China to form its champions. The former French Olympic firing medalist Jean-Pierre Amat, who joined the Chinese Biathlon Federation in 2019, has been a valuable source of information for the blues.
Noted in particular of the strong wind that sweeps the Zhangjiakou area, many international biathletes have had no choice but to innovate to prepare for expected disturbances during shooting sessions. “We are trying to be creative on the cold and the winding conditions,” entrusted French Quentin Fillon Maillet. On the occasion of an internship on the Birkebeineren ski stadium in Lillehammer, the Norwegians tested a giant fan.
Paradoxically, to listen to some, this jump in the unknown would not be such a bad thing. Fabien Saguez, the National Technical Director of Skiing at the French Federation, even sees a “bargain”: with the exception of the Chinese, “no one could take the advantage of the ground”. And to insist: “It gives the meters to zero, we have to do it a real force.”