As Olympic mania continues to sweep through Beijing in the lead up to the 2022 Winter Games, the People’s Republic is forging ahead with its unprecedented plans to exponentially grow the country’s winter sports industry.

In fact, since it was first revealed that China would be hosting the games back in 2015, the government has announced the National Construction Plan of Winter Sports Infrastructure, a monumental effort to build 650 skating rinks and 800 ski resorts by 2022. And if that rate of construction seems unbelievable, believe it, because according to China Daily, between 2014 and 2017 alone, 400 new ski resorts were erected.

Additionally, the official platform known as the Promotion Plan of Mass Winter Sports is an ambitious program that seeks to train 300 million skiers, skaters, ice hockey players, and other winter athletes over the next few years, with the goal being that some of these athletes will compete in the games, squash the competition, and bring both medals and honor to the country.

Speaking to Reuters in 2018, former ski instructor Liu Bo said that, “China spends big money setting up the stage [for the Winter Olympics], and the performers are all foreigners. President Xi will not allow this to happen. We have to be the leading actor in 2022.”

So given the fact that traditionally, winter sports haven’t been wildly popular across China, and thus there’s a lack of qualified instructors on the ground, the question remains: Who’s going to train all these athletes?

Enter American hockey team, the Los Angeles Kings, and Chinese billionaire and chairman of Beijing-based company ORG Packaging, Zhou Yunjie, who last year partnered together to establish the Beijing Jr. Kings, the NHL’s first full-time youth development program in China.

With 30 hockey novices age 14 and younger joining up last year, the program has so far been successful. Speaking to NBC News earlier this month, Josh Veilleux, senior vice president of AEG Global Partnerships — AEG is the Kings’ parent company — speculated that a hundred kids could be signed up by 2020. 

What’s more, resident Beijing Jr. Kings coach Hannah Westbrook said that she was, “blown away by not only the amount of youth hockey players involved in the sport, especially the numbers below the age of 8, but by how talented and skilled these individuals are.”

Despite the fact that in 2017, China, which has more than 1.3 billion residents, had merely 1,101 registered adult and youth hockey players, Zhou and the Los Angeles Kings don’t think the sport is an entirely lost cause in the capital. Surprisingly enough, when the Kings first set up shop in Southern California in 1967, they too struggled to gain traction. However after the franchise was able to recruit Wayne Gretzky in 1988, the team gained a whole new level of star power and fame.

Admittedly, the kids currently participating in the Beijing Jr. Kings program won’t be old enough to join China’s national hockey team for the 2022 Olympics, but that’s not to say they won’t be primed and ready for the next big event. And with more foreign-born players of Chinese descent returning to their homeland to compete in the games, who’s to say the country won’t find its own Gretzky, and in the process, a legion of hockey fans as well?

Photos: Pixabay