LANZHOU, China, Feb. 7 (Xinhua) -- Every late night, Wang Xinglong and his team get up to the piste to pile and tidy up snow at the Baiyin national snow event training base in northwest China's Gansu Province, and they have been working here with no rest for over two months.
Every morning in the past two months, the Chinese Paralympic cross-country skiing and biathlon teams wake up with the beauty of the snow on the pistes and started their daytime routine with joy and confidence.
For these athletes who will represent China in the Beijing 2022 Paralympic Winter Games in March, the beauticians on the snow are the magicians for their success.
After training during the day, the snow pistes of the base are full of bumps and holes, which need Wang and his team to work almost the whole night to clean and re-shape the pistes in order to prepare a perfect field for the daily training routine.
"It's chilly late in the night here, but we have to have our job done before the sunrise for next day's training," Wang said.
The local daytime temperature is minus 10 degrees centigrade, which allows athletes to wear thin body-shaped outfits on the snow. But the temperature drops 5-6 degrees centigrade after the sunset and it feels even colder in the gusty wind during the night.
The low temperature easily freezes the water pipes at night and the wind can blow the water back into the machine which might damage the whole ice-making tools. Wang, however, is used to it and uses a hot lamp to heat the pipe.
"We can make snow after about ten minutes of heating," Wang said.
But the wind is always a big problem for Wang.
"If the strong wind blew snow into snow guns, it was easy to damage them," said Wang. Every time the strong wind comes, Wang and other workers have to turn off the machine, turn around the direction of the water-gun and wait for the wind to stop.
The snow team wasted no time to begin the inspection work on the piste after hours of snow-making. Ignoring the wind blowing on his face like a knife, Lu Wen, the base manager, rode a snowmobile slowly along the 3.5-kilometer-long piste. After an hour of inspection, Lu felt frozen.
"I've been used to the cold environment," said Lu, adding that the piste shall be 8 meters wide and half a meter thick that could meet athlete's need.
It was about 4:30 a.m. when Lu finishes his inspection. Then Wang got on a snow groomer and began to groom at dark night.
Wang indicated that the grooming cannot be carried out too early in order not to harden the snow too much. He usually drives on a snow groomer for four loops from around 4 a.m., which takes him about three hours.
"I will finish my work before 7:30 every morning so that the athletes can feel the best on the piste during the training time from 9:00 a.m.," Wang said.
Fu Chunshan, coach of the Chinese Paralympic cross-country skiing and biathlon teams, believed that the track in the base was very similar to the venue of the Beijing Paralympic Winter Games.
"All the staff on the piste have done a really nice job. The training will last over 40 days for athletes here before Beijing 2022," Fu said.
Wang, Lu and others of the snow team were local farmers near the base in Baiyin City. At the end of 2019, after the establishment of the national training base, they began to work here. Over the past few years, farmers like Wang and Lu who once knew nothing about winter sports have become professionals in snowmaking and snow grooming.
During the Chinese Spring Festival, athletes took training sessions as usual. Wang and his team also silently guarded the track and contributed their strength to it every day.
"Winter sports changed our lives. We are very proud that the Winter Olympic Games is held in our country, and we are part of the preparation of athletes," Wang said. ■
