A special team of winter electricity maintenance technicians is ready for the Winter Olympic Games 2022 in Yanqing's National Alpine Skiing Centre Photo: State Grid's Winter Olympics maintenance group

The Yanqing ski hub in northwestern Beijing, a major venue for alpine skiing for the Beijing 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, entered the final preparations and the highly expected event also created new job opportunities such as skiers specialized on electricity maintenance.  

In an area of 4.32 million square meters for alpine skiing, equal to 560 football fields, the National Alpine Skiing Centre has seven runs with steep slopes, a combined length of 9.2 kilometers and a vertical drop of 900 meters. This is also the first domestic skiing venue that meets the standards of the Winter Olympic Games, ranking among the top three venues across the world in terms of construction standards and competition difficulty, Wang Shen, a senior manager from the electricity maintenance team of the center, told the Global Times on Thursday. 

"Such high standard also has higher requirements on maintenance of the venue, including the maintenance of the electricity infrastructure," Wang said. 

The venue also created some new job opportunities for China's youth who are devoted to ice sports. 

"I've been working here for more than a year after I graduated from a sports college in North China's Jilin Province, specializing on ice sports," a 26-year-old electricity maintenance worker surnamed Xu told the Global Times on Thursday. "At the beginning, it was a slow process for us to learn the maintenance of the electricity network, as it was completely different occupation," he said. 

Xu is one of the 22 skillful skiers hired from different sports colleges across the country last year to be part of a multidisciplinary maintenance team to ensure that the electricity network in the cluster in extremely cold weather can function properly, especially when the electric equipment in steep slopes is scattered, posing new challenges for traditional electricity maintenance work. 

After more than a year of professional training, Xu and his coworkers have been transforming from ski-lovers to winter electricity maintenance technician. They demonstrated their capacity to conduct network surveillance and maintenance in the recent test events of the Winter Olympic Games. 

Besides the winter electricity maintenance technician, the Games has also created other new jobs such as ice makers, ski instructors, mountain rescue personnel and drone pilots, according to media reports. 

To fend off the risks of the COVID-19, maintenance staff will soon enter a closed loop before the Games begin in February. 

The Beijing Winter Olympic Games will be held from February 4 to February 20, 2022 in Beijing's Yanqing district and neighboring Zhangjiakou, in North China's Hebei Province.

Over the past five years, the Yanqing district has offered training related to the Winter Olympic Games to fill over 50,000 job positions, according to local authorities. Training on ice sports also helped more than 1,400 people to find jobs, largely boosting local employment rates. 

"I feel honored to be part of the Games. As my major was in ice sports, I always have a Winter Olympic Games dream," Xu said.