Beijing's 'Bird's Nest' Olympic Stadium to be winter sports park

Beijing's 'Bird's Nest' Olympic Stadium is to be transformed into a winter sports park offering skiing and snowboarding in a bid to remain profitable following China's hosting of the 2008 summer games.

By Peter Foster in Beijing

Published: 5:00AM GMT 01 Dec 2009

Beijing's 'Bird's Nest' Olympic Stadium is to be transformed into a winter sports park Photo: EPA Fears that the landmark £300 million stadium would become one of the biggest white elephants in Olympic history initially appeared unfounded as up to 50,000 tourists queued to pose on the track where Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt smashed the world 100 metre record.

Despite the echoing rows of empty seats in the 80,000 capacity stadium, visitors paid to dress up in official Team China tracksuits and have their photographs taken on the winner's rostrum, complete with fake winner's medals.

However a sharp drop-off in visitors to just 10,000 a day in the latter half of this year appeared to suggest that the novelty was fast wearing off.

Plans to expand the stadium complex and building a shopping and restaurant complex have been put on hold as the stadium's owners struggle to find ways to keep the complex profitable.

In August the Beijing city government took a controlling stake in the business, promising to boost the profitability and social usefulness of the stadium by holding large public events.

Earlier this year a huge-scale performance of the opera Turandot was staged to mark the one-year anniversary of China's hosting of the Olympics and plans are afoot to host a soccer match with Real Madrid next year.

The owners hope to attract 20,000 people a day to its snow park, which will charge a little over £10 for entry and offer a range of artificial ramps and slopes for enthusiasts to try their skills on.

Although Beijing gets very cold in winter, it rarely snows in China's capital, so the perfect powder conditions will be generated using artificial snow-cannons.

Beijing residents have long enjoyed the more genteel pastime of skating on the city's many lakes, but organisers said they hoped that the new middle classes would be attracted by the chance to try more adrenalin-fuelled winter pastimes.

"The Bird's Nest will not have a cold winter again," Wu Jingjun, the president of the National Stadium Co Ltd, told the state-run China Daily newspaper. "We will create seasonal events almost every month from now on with assistance from the government and, importantly, the public."