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Winter Olympians are accustomed to completing their awe-inspiring exploits against the stunning background of snow-capped mountains.
Beijing’s Big Air Shougang Olympic site, on the other hand, is attracting notice for its considerably edgier, urban environment.
Behind the skiers taking off from the 60-meter-high (196-foot) ramp are furnaces, tall chimney stacks, and cooling towers from a former steel mill that contributed to the Chinese capital’s notoriously polluted skies for decades.
The mill, which was founded in 1919, ended operations more than 15 years ago as part of measures to clean up the capital’s air ahead of the Summer Olympics in 2008.
According to engineering and architecture firm ARUP, this left a vast length of prime city center property perfect for rehabilitation and regeneration, which converted the site into a lively hub for tourist and art exhibitions, even hosting an electronic music festival in 2013.
The mill’s rusted, decaying relics were never dismantled, not even for the large air jump at the 2022 Winter Olympics.
Instead, the ancient mill has been integrated into the design of Big Air Shougang. One of the cooling towers even has the Games emblem on it.
The leap has piqued the interest of social media users, not only because of the mountains of fake snow created to host the event but also because of the mystery of what these towers are and why they’re still standing immediately behind the jump.
Some Twitter users speculated that it may be a nuclear power facility.
“The Big Air stadium for the Olympics appears to be directly adjacent to the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant,” said @jlove1982.
Another Twitter user, @LindsayMpls, said, “Feels rather dystopian to have some type of nuclear site as the backdrop for this Big Air skiing event.”
The Shougang Large Air is the world’s first long-term permanent big air facility. According to the architecture company TeamMinus, which built the leap, it lies on the shore of Qunming Lake, on the west side of the cooling towers, at 88 meters (288 ft) above sea level.
On their website, TeamMinus explained the idea for its design, claiming the influence of Chinese flying apsaras, heavenly entities that feature in both Buddhist and Hindu traditions.
