With the opening ceremony set to take place inside a long-abandoned competition venue this week, officials for the Gangwon Winter Youth Olympics have been dealing with a unique set of challenges.
Gangneung Oval, the speed skating venue for the Jan. 19-Feb. 1 youth competition, will provide the stage for the opening ceremony on Friday in Gangneung, some 160 kilometers east of Seoul in Gangwon Province. It is scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. and end at 9:30 p.m. The main stage will be set up in the middle of the rink, with athletes’ stands on either side of the stage. The track will serve as the acting area for performers.
Then starting at 11 a.m. the very next day, the oval will have to be set up for an official training session for the teen athletes. And the first speed skating medals will be awarded on Monday.
The oval will have to undergo a quick conversion from a ceremonial venue to a competition venue, and Gangwon officials are confident the transformation will be smooth.
“We have our conversion plan read
y, and we haven’t experienced any problem whatsoever with our ice making” said Lee Jun-gu, venue manager in charge of Gangneung Oval, in a recent media briefing.
Gangneung Oval was built for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics but had been mostly abandoned since, other than a few occasions when it served as a set for local films. Gangwon 2024 will be the first athletic competition taking place at the oval since the Olympics six years ago.
There were obvious concerns about the quality of ice there, but Lee said the oval had already passed rigorous testing by international officials with flying colors.
“We’ve been going through tests since March last year, and the International Skating Union and other organizations have all certified our ice for use in competition,” Lee explained. “Ice experts from PyeongChang 2018 helped set up a system to get just the right temperature for the ice here. We’re confident in our ice here.”
Lee said ISU experts and skaters alike have both raved about the oval’s ice and rated
it better than the one at Taeneung International Rink in Seoul, which regularly hosts domestic and international races.
Those working on the opening ceremony had their share of issues during the buildup to the event.
Oh Jang-hwan, executive producer of the ceremony who had also worked on the ceremonies for PyeongChang 2018, said the ceremony staff and the venue staff have had to make sure not to get in each other’s way — at times literally.
“We have this ceremony one day and they have the official training the very next day. The competition is important but so is the opening ceremony. So this has been a sensitive issue,” Oh said. “While people were working on ice, we couldn’t use certain parts of the oval. We’ve always had to coordinate our schedules, and that meant we sometimes only had a small window of time to work on our show. That’s been a really difficult part of our preparation.”
But Oh said the unique setup of having the ceremony inside will make it all worthwhile.
“I understand this will be the
first opening ceremony of the Youth Olympics held inside a speed skating arena,” Oh said. “We’ll have the stage in the middle of the long rink. This is going to be different than other ceremonies.”
Source: Yonhap News Agency