Beijing's Olympic Stadium Evolves Into Winter Sports Park

Beijing's 'Bird's Nest' Olympic Stadium has been transformed into a winter sports park offering skiing and snowboarding.

10 artificial snow machines have turned the showcase Olympic stadium into a venue hosting the 'Happy Snow and Ice Season' carnival.

For a 180-yuan ($28) entrance fee, visitors can ice skate, ski, snowboard and enjoy dog sled races. The attraction, which will operate until February and which hopes to attract 20,000 people a day, also offers a 5,130 metre2 carpet of man-made snow up to one metre thick covering the stadium floor and sitting beneath a towering fake mountain.

Although Beijing gets very cold in winter, it rarely snows in China's capital. The city's residents have long enjoyed the more genteel pastime of skating on the city's many frozen 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 winter sports park is part of initiatives to keep the Olympic Stadium profitable following China's hosting of the 2008 summer games.

Fears that the landmark stadium would become one of the biggest white elephants in Olympic history initially appeared unfounded as tourists queue to pose on the track. Visitors pay to dress up in official Team China tracksuits and have their photographs taken on the winner's rostrum, complete with fake winner's medals.

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 football match with Real Madrid next year.

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.

As Wu Jingjun, 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."

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