Bobsledders and sledders will ride a track of superlatives at the 2022 Games. That cost China hundreds of millions of dollars.
“The Dragon of Yanqing” cost 500 million dollars, in the background the highway that opens up the ice channel.
The Whistler Ice Track disaster happened in 2010, before the Olympic flame was lit. The Georgian sledder Nodar Kumaritashvili lost control in the penultimate corner during training, shot over the edge of the track and crashed into an iron bar. The athlete died. There was a minute’s silence at the opening ceremony, but the day after the accident, the blotting started again in Whistler. Still, the Georgian’s death had long-term repercussions. The hunt for more and more speed, which had reached over 150 km/h in Canada, was stopped. There is a speed limit of 135 km/h for bobsleigh and toboggan runs.
This is one of the reasons why the dragon of Yanqing slowly winds its way down to the valley. A difference in altitude of 127 meters over a length of 1900 meters is not exorbitant. But that doesn’t mean that the track isn’t spectacular. Architecturally, it is unique, although the Chinese have already made it clear on the way there that they’ve done a lot here, not a mess. A highway with multiple arms and spectacular curves descends into the valley on concrete pillars, and is breathtaking in itself. The highway ends in a huge parking lot just below the finish line of the bobsled.
“Final stage of bobsleigh”
According to the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, this first left the German bobsleigh guru Gerd Leopold speechless at the test races in November and then made him resort to superlatives. It was the most impressive thing he had ever seen, he said. “It’s the final stage of bobsleigh in general. That will never happen again in this world.” The railway stands on 1,000 concrete pillars that have been set up to 17 meters deep in the ground. Germany’s Thomas Schwab, who was involved in the planning, told ARD that the shafts were dug by hand, and in the end it was necessary to provide the workers at depth with oxygen.
The tracking shot through the ice channel.
The ice chute has 16 curves and is completely covered, as is the small finish stadium where it ends. The roof is walkable and there is an imposing hotel at turn 13. All this had its price. A bobsleigh run is usually available for 50 to 100 million dollars, the Chinese have invested many times that. Wikipedia mentions costs of 2.5 billion dollars, this figure is now being adopted in various media. Schwab says that was out of thin air, but still names a proud price: $ 500 million.
The big challenge of this ice channel is that it is not very fast. In addition, the curve radii are relatively open. Tobogganists and bobsledders report that it is extremely difficult to hit the curves correctly because little pressure is built up due to the low speed. The American tobogganist Jason Terdiman says: “Sometimes we don’t feel where we are.” This increases the risk of driving errors, but these should not be fatal. If you come out of the curve too high or too low, you will touch the barriers and simply lose speed.
As a result, it is often not a matter of hundredths but of tenths of a second. And these high demands are intentional. The track was planned by Uwe Deyle from Stuttgart, who has already designed various Olympic bobsleigh tracks. The business with the ice cream was practically put into his cradle. His father Werner was a refrigeration technician and created the world’s first artificial ice rink in 1968 in Königssee in Bavaria.
A roller coaster made of ice – the ice track in Yanqing.
A tingling in the stomach
Uwe Deyle says about the course in Yanqing: “The pilots have to find their way and have 1001 ways to attack.” The centerpiece of the track is a 370-degree spiral, into which compression has been built: at just over 210 meters, it first goes steeply downhill and then just as steeply up again – and that in a tight curve radius. Forces up to four times your own body weight act for around seven seconds. Anyone who has ridden a roller coaster knows the tingling sensation that arises in the stomach.
Forces of up to four times your own body weight act in the 370-degree curve.
When the track was used by international athletes for the first time, it hit the headlines because of a devastating accident: the Polish sledder Mateusz Sochowicz suffered a complicated fracture of his lower leg and other injuries. However, this was not due to the dangerous nature of the railway, but to the dilettantism of the Chinese helpers. Sochowicz was given the green light at the start, but a lane barrier a little further down had not been opened. The athlete raced towards them at around 50 km/h and prevented worse by attempting to jump over the barrier in an acrobatic manner.
It can be assumed that the helpers have learned from this mistake and that the Olympic races will be carried out without acrobatic interludes. The big question is what happens after that. Although there will be international competitions in Yanqing in the future, that alone does not justify the huge investments. Apparently the Chinese are planning to open the ice chute on a large scale for taxi rides and hobby sledders. The hotel for the daring is already there. And the access road is designed for hordes of tourists.