On 7th July 2014, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced the names of the three candidate cities who were bidding to host the 2022 Olympic Winter Games: Almaty (Kazakhstan), Oslo (Norway) and Beijing (China). As a result of public discussion in Norway, Oslo withdrew its candidacy during the bidding process. On 31th July 2015, at the 128th IOC session in Kuala Lumpur, the city of Beijing was elected to stage the 2022 Olympic Winter Games, defeating Almaty by four votes.  Thus, Beijing will be the first city in history to host both editions of the Games. While the Games of the XXIX Olympiad were held there in 2008, the Olympic Winter Games are scheduled to take place from 4th to 20th February 2022, during the celebration of the Chinese New Year, 2022 will be the year of the tiger. The organisers are now in the preparation phase of the Games and their main task is to create “Joyful Rendezvous Upon Pure Ice and Snow” in order to increase the interest of the home audience in winter sports. 

     Although the city has built a number of new sports venues, they will be combined with the facilities constructed for the Summer Games in 2008.The opening and closing ceremonies will be held at the Beijing National Stadium, commonly known as the Bird’s Nest. The Beijing zone will include venues for indoor sports (curling, ice hockey and figure skating) and the Big Air competitions. Yanqing, a city 80 km from the capital, will hold the alpine and freestyle skiing events, the bobsleigh, luge and snowboarding, while the skeleton racers, biathletes, cross-country skiers, ski jumpers and competitors in the Nordic combined will compete in the famous winter resort of Zhangjiakou. There will be a total of 109 medal events, spread over seven sports and fifteen disciplines. To improve gender equality, mixed team competitions have become a fundamental part of the Olympic schedule. There will be as many as nine in Beijing and four of them are brand-new. There is also a new event, the women’s monobob. These will be the Olympics with the greatest degree of gender equality ever seen in the history of the Winter Olympics. 

  Zdenka Letenayová