From the heart of Beijing to the edges of the global stage, you are at Roundtable.
I'm Niu Henlin.
Happy Winter Olympic season again!
Many highlights, great games to observe ahead of us.
As for China, our winter sports story used to be about individual breakthroughs more, but today it's increasingly about systems.
While stars like Ailin Gu and Su Yiming continue to push the limits of their No sports events.
Traditional powerhouses like speed skating and short track are also entering a new cycle with new lineups, new strategies, new technology at the core.
This episode takes you inside that transformation, both on the ice and behind the scenes.
For today's show, I'm joined by Yu Shen and Steve Hatherly.
Now pull up a chair and join the conversation.
The Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 has kicked off in Italy.
China's ice and snow team has been gearing up for battle on the slopes, on the ice and quietly in the lab as well.
From star athletes chasing harder tricks to smart suits built with aerospace materials and embedded sensors, and two state-of-the-art broadcasting technologies for us.
How far can science push Olympic performance is the question we try to answer for today's roundtable.
But before that, let's talk a little bit more about this year's Winter Olympics.
Many fun things to know.
And starting with The fact that we are looking at the game from February 6th to the 22nd.
Yes, it is the 25th iteration of the Winter Olympic Games and the fourth Olympic competition hosted by Italy.
Oh, good job, Italy.
Turin, I think, was the last time that they held it.
That was in 2006, and then it was Rome in 1960, and then I think one more time maybe in the 1950s.
I don't know where that was, though.
Because Winter Olympic Games have a lot of requirements when it comes to environment.
Snow, no good good cold temperatures yes everything, but not too cold.
That's what i learned from the previous one in beijing.
So yes, Yeah.
And also, the opening ceremony was held on February 6th in local time, though several competitions have already been underway before then, including curling ice hockey, luge ski jumping, snowboarding and figure skating, and I remember, during the ceremony, very well-known chinese pianist long long was uh, playing.
It was his second time playing in a opening ceremony of the olympics.
Yes, really good, really good performance.
I always check out the mascots because i'm curious to know what they are or, let me rephrase, i'm curious to know if i know what they are.
And this time also, I did not know what they were.
They are Stouts, S-T-O-A-T.
And one's called Tina and the other is called Milo.
And the names are coming from the location of the Olympic Games, like Core Tina.
And Milano.
That's why they're called that.
Now, what the heck is a stout?
I couldn't even tell by looking at them.
So I searched it.
Stouts are small carnivorous mammals in the weasel family.
So there you go.
I guess they're native to that region or something like that.
Apparently, they have them here in China, too, according to what I found.
But anyway, yeah, those are the two mascots.
And they're quite cute to look at, although hard to identify.
Especially in the field that is covered by snow.
They always jump here and there and it looks really cute.
And, of course, as you mentioned, the Winter Olympics venues and locations.
These Olympics are spread across North and Italy, with events clustered by geography and also sport.
So Milan hosts most of the indoor ice competitions, including ice hockey, figure skating and speed skating, and also stage the opening ceremony.
And Cortina is the centerpiece for Alpine events, hosting like alpine skiing, along with the sliding disciplines.
So snowboarding and free skiing take place in Livigno.
Livigno.
Livigno, sorry.
You're forgiven, yeah.
It's okay.
Yeah, so some of these events are scattered in that area.
Oh, they're very much scattered.
Kind of creating a little bit of hustle for the media, for also the athletes.
But there's a reason for that.
Holding Olympics, especially when it comes to Winter Olympics.
We mentioned the fact that geology is very important.
And also, you want the slope, you want good snow.
You also want it to be environmentally friendly, which is why there are four different regions, areas for the competing areas and the four competing areas.
Each and every one would be so far away from each other, 200 kilometers away from each other.
But it is for a good reason.
And if we're looking at the venues, more than or around 85 of the venues would be transformed, are transformed from already existing venues or they're temporary, so that it does not cause a huge burden for the environment.
Yeah, it's just not really possible to have every event located next to each other, on the same street, for example.
It's not going to work out like that.
And the upside, I guess, when you have all these places spread out...
Is the scenery and the possibility for sustainability.
But of course there's a downside too, and that's travel and logistics for athletes and for the media and for the people who are attending as well.
Because you might visit one event in one location and the next place you need to go for your next event might be an hour or more away.
It just depends.
Yeah, but I think, in my opinion, the pros outweigh the cons.
If you really think about the fact that it's a one-time, four-year thing and we do not want to put too much problem or burden on the environment.
And also, if we can make it a routine, it'll be easier for each and every hosting country to think about the cost and think about hosting it again, which would be a good idea, so that more games can happen in different countries, and we can, we'll be able.
More people will be able to appreciate it, which is why IOC has been praising this, and they have even cited the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, saying that because Beijing started to use many of the venues from the 2008 summer games, including the water cube, but making it an ice one, which is very innovative and a fun thing to do.
And that encouraged more countries to think like this and to be able to bear the cost of hosting an Olympics.
Sure, and some of your venues will be within the cities themselves, but then other ones, for example the skiing events.
You need mountains for those.
So you don't find those downtown very often, do you?
And I watched one of the videos that Guailin posted online.
As athletes, they have to get off the maybe shuttle bus and then walk to the venue for a little bit.
And then she said, OK, I'll just treat it as a warm up for athletes.
So I think understanding it as this way is also a good way.
Besides the basics of this year's Olympic, what are some other fun highlights we need to mention?
Well, one, I think, is the new event.
Now the Winter Olympics.
Summer Olympics apparently adds more events more regularly than the Winter Olympics does.
This year, there are 116 events across 16 different sports.
There's about 2,900 athletes, 90 countries represented.
But the new one, the new sport, is called ski mountaineering, or skimo, as it's affectionately called.
It's making its Olympic debut.
Have you watched any videos on what this is?
It looks really hard.
You need to use that ski gadget in practice.
Climb up to the mountain?
Yeah, you use skis, but you go up the mountain.
You also go down the mountain as well.
So there's a couple of different events.
One is called the sprint, and that's where you wear your skis and you go up the mountain.
Now you're thinking, how in the heck do you do that?
They call them skins, and they put them on the bottom of their skis.
They're for grip.
So you go up until it gets too steep, and then you take your skis off, you put them in your backpack, then you go hiking up to a certain point.
When you get to the top then you take the skins off your skis and you ski down through a course to get to the bottom.
That's one event.
Then they have a relay event as well, where you have a teammate, and then so if it was me and Yuxin, for example, Yuxin would do the course and come down and tag, and then it's my turn, and then I come down, and then he does it again, and then I do it again.
You both do it twice.
This reminds me of cross-country skiing, but I think this one is even harder, and the slope as well as the climbing.
Athletes would have to do more climbing.
That's another thing about inventing quote-unquote or trying to find out a new event or new sport for something as high standard as the winter olympics.
That is when you change things, change the um requirements.
Uh, maybe it's already a new sport because it involves new strategies and new gears and also new standards.
Yeah, the sprint version of schemo or ski mountaineering is really quick.
One lap up and down only takes about three to four minutes.
So it's really intense and it's really fast.
So the athletes have to do their very best, of course.
Interestingly, this is the first new sport in the Winter Olympics since 2002.
They haven't introduced a new one since 2002.
So it's been 24, almost 25 years or so.
At that time, Skeleton came back That was the one that was reintroduced in 2002.
That was gone for 54 years from the Olympics, but it came back at that time.
They said it was too dangerous.
I get it.
I guess, what, did it get safer?
I don't know.
Anyway, they brought it back at that time.
Yeah, and also new medal events include a dual moguls in freestyle skiing, men's and women's doubles in luge replacing the open doubles event, and also team alpine combined for men and women.
Women's Large Hill Ski Jumping plus a mixed team relay in Skeleton.
They are like something we may be familiar with, but also very exciting and new.
Yeah, some new events.
Only one new sport, but there are some new events.
Yes.
How about for the Chinese team this year?
We know that China is sending a 286-member delegation to the Winter Olympics, including 126 athletes, 68 women and 58 men.
And the team's average age is around 25, which makes a lot of sense.
And also we know that first Olympic participants and veterans include.
We have someone attending it for the very first time, but 67 athletes are heading to it for the very first time and 59 have competed before.
Yeah.
And among those 59, nine of those won gold at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.
So some good experienced athletes traveling.
That's actually very interesting, because one thing we noticed from the over 120 athletes is that, Both in terms of athlete numbers and event entered, we have a participation rate of 784, meaning that Chinese team will attend almost 80 of all of the events.
And that is something only possible, or maybe being improved to this extent because, in 2022, many athletes who haven't really have the chance to stand on a world stage when it comes to Winter Games got the chance for the very first time.
And I think this happened to many countries.
That is when your country hosted a game for a time, for once.
The following year would also be a good year, because it got the experience and you know what it really is to compete in a game like this.
And you can train accordingly.
That would lead to a really good second or continuous year.
Yeah, this is China's largest overseas winter games yet in terms of athlete representation.
Yeah, and among all of these events, we got a medal on the evening of February the 7th, 2026.
The men's snowboard Big Air final just finished.
Chinese athlete Su Yiming claimed the bronze medal with a total score of 1685 points, marking the first medal for the Chinese delegation at this edition of the Games.
Well done indeed.
Yes, and he's definitely a star athlete when it comes to Winter Olympics.
We have some more.
The team is led by two absolute icons.
First of all, we kind of also mentioned them.
Freestyle skier Gu Weilin and snowboarder Su Yiming.
Both are defending their gold medalists from the Beijing 2022 Games.
And also we've got new faces and veterans.
It's kind of a young squad with an average age of 25, and a whopping 67 athletes are making their Olympic debut.
And also the youngest is just 17 years old, snowboarder Ren Chongshuo.
But they still have veterans like short track star Fan Kexing and also freestyle skier Xu Mengtao to lead the way.
I was wondering what it's like to watch them just on the side of a, well, just in the track.
Well, you cannot be in the track, but really in the observer's seat and watch a game.
And I know you're a huge fan of winter games, so...
I went to the Winter Olympics when they were in PyeongChang in Korea, in I think it was 2018, and I got to see bobsledding ice hockey, curling and big air.
As you just mentioned, the snowboarding event.
What was really cool I mean bobsledding was fun, because you can get literally right next to the track.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, you're really close.
So it's kind of funny because you hear there's TVs so you can see it before they get to where you are located on the track.
But then as it gets closer, you can hear it coming.
It's like...
And then when it finally comes past you, I mean I don't know how fast they're going, but they are there and gone in a blink of an eye.
So that was pretty cool.
Hockey was fun, of course.
Curling was fun.
But the cool story from the Big Air event.
The night before my friend and I shared a taxi with a stranger.
This guy said, hey, I'm having trouble grabbing a cab.
Can I go back to the area with you?
So we were chatting in the taxi, and he said, oh, my brother's in the Big Air event tomorrow.
His name's Red Gerard.
He's actually the youngest person in the event.
He's 17 years old.
So I said, oh, we're going to that event in the morning.
He said, oh, cool.
We'll cheer for Red Gerard, please.
I said, cool, man.
So we go the next morning and then the competition's going on, and they each have three runs right or three tries.
And so Red goes, and he falls down on his first try.
And then he goes again, and he falls down on his second try.
And before his final try, the announcer at the event said, hey, everybody, let's cheer for Red.
He's the youngest person in this event.
He's just a teenager, 17 years old.
So no matter where you're from, let's all give him our support.
So all the country's flags were waving, right?
But everybody started cheering for this kid.
Kid comes down, nails it, wins the gold medal.
And the people in the audience were going nuts.
And there were so many people from around the world.
They're all cheering for this one kid.
What an amazing moment. that is the charm of sports games.
You can not know the athlete, but you can always.
Always appreciate their techniques but, more importantly, their spirit.
Yeah.
They're trying that hard and in being able to emerge, be emerged in that vibe.
It's super cool.
That's, the beauty of being able to watch a game on site.
But nowadays, I think the atmosphere and the fact that you are cheering with other observers is one thing.
But now, because we're able to, um one, we're at home very cozy in the couch watching a broadcasting of the games.
More things can happen because we have the help of technology, helping you, analyzing the game, replay the important moment in slow motion right after it happened.
Remember, like 10 years ago, maybe not even 10 years ago, like eight years ago, five years ago, you would need the broadcasters to give you need to give them a little bit time to slice it and then to replay it to let you see the exciting moments.
But now that happens just right after the exciting moment happened.
And not only are the hosts of that show, were those who are explaining what is happening, why which team won.
You can even see different analyzing based on or thanks to technology, to computers.
They give you the angle, they give you exactly what happened, which maneuver they.
They actually did.
And that's That's also the beauty of sitting at home and watch the game.
Exactly.
Just four years ago when Beijing was hosting that.
Did you go?
I didn't.
You didn't?
But I want to say is that one of my friends went to that like big air venue.
It's actually close to our studio.
It's just in that Shogun area.
And they like he took some pictures and posted on social media.
And I saw that.
But I just realized that maybe it could be even better when I watch it on TV than just watch it in person.
It's a different experience.
It's a different kind of good, right?
Yeah, you get to see a lot more.
Because when I was there in the crowd at the Big Air event, I said how close you could get to the bobsledding track.
But the Big Air, you're just at the bottom of the mountain sitting in the grandstands.
So in the big air event you see the athlete very far away and you see them go down and then they disappear for a second.
And then they pop up and then they're flying through the air and they go down and then they disappear again.
So that's kind of what you see.
It's still really cool.
It is really cool.
And that is when a lot of these technological things is coming in with some AI and high tech things.
So Alibaba's cloud is teaming up with Olympic Broadcasting Services or OBS.
They're about to bring some seriously futuristic tech to Milano Cortina.
For the first time ever, they're using that LLM, Large Language Model Technology, specifically Alibaba's QN to change how we watch the games.
Basically, they have that. instant and fast translation service for audiences and also athletes.
And also the smarter broadcasting things is offering a better perspective when we're watching this through online.
So instead of, like producers, spending hours scrubbing through footage, they can just type find the figure skating gold medal performance and then get the clip immediately.
We are just getting that kind of upgraded 360-degree replays that can create a 3D reconstruction of a big moment in as little as 15 to 20 seconds.
I think that's what Neil Holingwood just said.
How quick and fast we can get when we want to play that replay.
They even have a feature called Space Time Slices.
Our organization does that, by the way.
What's Space Time Slices?
It's just they got the most important seconds of that motion, of what actually made that magical moment happen, and then replay it, but with analysis provided by AI technology.
So you can rewatch it as long as you want and you can even analyze the angle, the strategies the athletes are using which, in my opinion, would also be good for the rival to learn.
Yeah, so kind of a Um, like taking it into a very specific example a skier taking off and then mid air rotation and then landing all in one single image and then you can check everything in that in that one picture.
Yeah, really cool.
Um, first person drones are being used as well.
This is really cool um.
It, it has relied on drones.
The olympics has relied on drones for a while, going back, i think, to 2014, but the newer generations of tech are going to bring the audience closer to the competition than in the past.
So in many of the sports you'll be seeing images that we haven't been able to see before in how these sports work are covered.
First-person drones.
It's kind of cool.
Brings you right into the action.
Without interfering the performance of the athletes.
If so, this will be the last time they are using first-person drones.
Oh, I think I watched some of the videos.
I think the sport is called ski jumping.
You go down the slide and then fly.
Like a crazy person.
I don't know where you get the bravery to do this.
And I saw a drone, probably a drone following that athlete.
And just you can totally see how it's flying in the air.
Man at Pyeongchang.
When I was there, I didn't watch the ski jumping event, but we drove past the location.
That ski jump, when you look at it on television, it doesn't offer the same...
It doesn't give you the scariness.
Yeah, because it's like it looks like a roller coaster from the top when you go like the steepness.
It's it's impossible to capture that on TV, I guess.
But they are.
It's like a vertical drop, almost before they bounce back up and fly through the air like a bird.
And I think, with all this, I kind of know how come, every single time when there is a major sport event winter games or summer games, different types of Olympic games we would see CMG transporting that huge broadcasting truck to different locations, because you have all the technology, all the equipment, all the gears equipped on that or within, built within that truck.
You kind of really need that to make sure that all of the audience worldwide would be able to enjoy the games as much as we can, especially when we are also responsible for the producing of the four international feed for broadcasters all around the world.
So we're producing that to ensure to and give it to obs so that uh, television stations and online um, i think streaming station would be able to use that feed.
So pretty cool.
And on top of the, we're getting a little bit too excited about the broadcasting site, because that's kind of what we do as well.
But for the athletes, they are having fun as well with new technology.
As far as i know, at least for the suit that they're wearing to when they're standing up the stage to, except the metal, they are already welcoming new technology.
As for the material, making sure that they're super light and very comfortable.
Designed for extreme cold, designed for high-speed competition.
One of the technologies that stands out, it's called thermal motion zoning.
It's this high-performance insulating materials that are used in core areas like your chest And the back, and it keeps athletes warm without adding extra bulk, which is really appreciated, I'm sure, from the athletes.
But I don't know.
Recently I watched a video of a mature male athlete finish his skiing track and then tear up, open or tear up his clothes and show up his body and uh, he was very excited and was like um, he's not afraid of coldness at all.
I don't think that was about the suit no, it was more about his moment.
Yes yeah, But you get excitement.
And one thing I realized after the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games was that more and more and more and more people are able to appreciate the beauty of not only observing the sport, but also actually playing the sport.
Yeah.
I mean for me.
I think my favorite thing about visiting the Olympics was yes, the events were cool.
But at nighttime... Do you want to try?
No.
Not where I was going with this.
At nighttime, every country has their own house, right?
So Canada house, America house, China house, maybe.
I'm not sure how many countries have their own houses.
But anyway, there are a lot of them.
And that's where you can go and hang out and get some food.
And some of them will have a DJ at night.
It's basically a party.
And the really cool thing is that everybody's wearing their country's colors and it really is a we are the world type vibe.
Everybody's in a good mood, everybody's really friendly.
I was wearing a canada jacket and so many people came up to me and like oh, cool country and nice people and oh, thanks a lot.
You know um, and really that was my favorite part of the whole thing is that Yeah, you have the athletes there doing their thing, but it's just so cool to be able to interact with other people who are visiting there and just have a chat about where they're from and blah blah, blah.
Yeah.
And another like lyric from, I think, is the Beijing's Summer Olympic theme song.
We're all living in that earth village.
And when we're also talking about the houses that athletes are living in.
They call it also Olympic Village.
So people are just living in that one little village and we're sharing kind of the same interests when people are just striving for that same goal of getting the gold medal.
I wanted to try the sport, and I did after the Beijing 2022.
Ah, only skating.
I am terrible at sports.
I don't know how to balance.
I cannot even stand on.
Hold on.
You're right.
I don't see your name on the Olympic team.
Thank you.
But the thing is, there are games that I dare not to try.
For example, skeleton.
I don't think I can do that.
I cannot, well, treat myself as a human cannonball.
Down the track.
I don't know.
I don't think I'm dare enough, but there are things that I tried to do failed terribly, but I get the fun.
And I totally want my kids to be able to enjoy those games.
And that is why I'm super happy to see more and more of these venues opening up in Beijing and around the country, even in the southern part of the country, and being very, very popular.
Yeah, I mean, that's what can happen.
When the athletes perform very well then it can inspire a lot of curiosity and interest in that particular sport, if it doesn't happen to be very popular in any given country at the time.
So we'll cheer on the Canadian and Chinese athletes, of course.
I'm super excited for men's and women's ice hockey.
If you don't bring home gold to Canada in ice hockey, it's about the worst thing that can happen to our country.
Oh, really?
Super cool.
We're still waiting to see more amazing games to happen in the next following several days.
So looking forward.
