Harbin: city of winter sports

At the recently-ended the Beijing 2022 Winter Games, athletes from Harbin, capital of northeastern China’s Heilongjiang Province, have achieved excellent results with three golds and one bronze.

Hailed as the cradle for China’s winter sports, Harbin boasts a profound ice and snow culture. Through developing winter sports by leaps and bounds, and cultivating many sports talents, the city has greatly contributed to China’s goal of engaging 300 million people in winter sports.

Excellent performance at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games

Athletes from Harbin are absolutely sports stars at the Winter Games, constituting an important force to China’s winter sports. Their stories have truly captured the hearts of all sports fans.

“Be down-to-earth, keep your heart pure and you can reach the top,” said Ren Ziwei, adding that people can always put faith in the team.

Zhang Yuting said, “I will put more effort in the future.”

Jin Boyang, who bounced back from the bottom, said, “It is my motherland that brings me the power to move forward.”

Zhang Kexin bravely challenged difficult moves, while failing, she stood up.

Peng Cheng and Jin Yang have proved their progress with more than ten years of persistence and hard work.

Sui Wenjing and Han Cong suffered from injuries, but they finally won gold with encouragement and support from each other.

Through the efforts of several generations, many top-notch athletes, coaches, management teams, logistical teams, and scientific support teams spring up in the city, which laid a cornerstone of the winter sports and contributed to the success at the Games.

Among the 176 Chinese athletes, 41 of them are from Harbin, making an important force in the national team. Their excellent performance is worthy of Harbin’s reputation as “a city of winter sports”.

Sports create happiness

The excellent performance is a result of years’ efforts. Just as Zhao Zhubo, the director of Harbin Sports Bureau, puts it, “Harbin’s ice and snow sports are not only an inheritance but also a channel and carrier that fits the city’s temperament and personality.”

Harbin has been developing winter sports since the day the city was built, which include figure skating, speed skating, ice hockey, curling, snowboarding, freestyle skiing, cross-country skiing, alpine skiing, among many others, has significantly contributed to the development of the winter sports in China. Widely hailed as the cradle and “signal lights” of China’s winter sports, Harbin has always been a source of top-notch athletes for the nation’s winter sports.

Undoubtedly, winter sports is not only an embodiment of the Olympic motto “Faster, Higher, Stronger”, but also serves as an engine for the development of the city. So from that perspective, what kind of lessons can Harbin learn in the future? From Zhao’s point of view, it enables Harbin to look at the winter sports and the positioning of the city in the future from a more comprehensive view.

For people in Harbin, the spirit of winter sports has already penetrated into every aspect of their lives. Just like dressing and eating, sports have reflected people’s lifestyles. The city has been striving to strengthen its advantages in winter sports and integrate “people’s fitness” with “people’s health”, in a bid to create happiness for all citizens. The Beijing 2022 Winter Games has further ignited people’s passion for winter sports, which offers a good opportunity for Harbin to build itself into a sports city.

Carry on the spirit of Games

The Harbin municipal government has long attached great importance to sports and has included the goal of “building a city of winter sports events” into the government work report. As Zhao puts it, to achieve that goal, the city needs a combined strategy of clearing minds, strengthening carriers, gathering resources, breaking bottlenecks, and optimizing the environment.

A series of measures including making full use of its advantage in winter sports, optimizing the use and flow of talents, and improving the environment for entrepreneurship and talent growth, will be taken to make Harbin’s winter sports industry stronger, provide strong support for its ice and snow economy, play an important role in improving the competitiveness of the athletes and promoting the winter sports.

Harbin will follow the path of the integration of sports and education, mass fitness and mass health, the marketization, and socialization of sports, to enable the winter sports to contribute more to the development of the city, the province, and the country in a broader sense. In that regard, the city will carry on the notion of engaging 30 million people in winter sports.

People expect that Harbin will continue its efforts to develop winter sports and create more happiness for the people and the world.

Source: Harbin Sports Bureau