How the Curling Ice in Beijing Was Made for the Olympics

Follow our stay protection of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

BEIJING — Ice would possibly simply appear to be ice.

But not in curling.

The frozen sheets created for elite competitions like the Olympics are the product of a painstaking course of underneath the course of a crew of specialists hewing to the specific calls for of making certain a heavy stone, aided by the livid sweeping of a brush, glides gracefully down a observe.

Even in the better of circumstances, in services constructed for the sport, the job is a disturbing one. In Beijing, it has been a complete different story.

The world’s consultants on creating ice worthy of Olympic-class curling had been handed a problem extra daunting than something that they had confronted: Turn an Olympic-size swimming pool in the National Aquatics Center into lanes of ice prepared for the world’s finest curlers.

“It’s never really been done before,” stated Hans R. Wuthrich, the chief ice technician for the Beijing Games, his fourth Olympics and simply one among many elite competitions in his decades-long profession.

Chinese officers have boasted about Beijing’s standing as the solely metropolis that has hosted each the Summer and Winter Games — a feat achieved, in half, by recycling venues constructed for the 2008 Olympics.

Curling occasions are in the natatorium with the honeycomb exterior, which was identified in 2008 as the Water Cube and the place Michael Phelps received eight gold medals for the United States. For the Winter Games, it has been rechristened as the Ice Cube. But getting it prepared was hardly so simple as altering its title.

A primary problem was to assemble the infrastructure to carry up the ice. The pool was crammed with a steel scaffolding system topped by a layer of concrete.

Then got here making the ice — and an early impediment: The Cube’s faucet water had a studying of 375 components per million of complete dissolved solids, like salts, minerals and ions. That quantity is appropriate for ingesting water, however freeze it, and it’s nonetheless not adequate to twist on. The impurities have an effect on the potential to make the sheets as flat as they are often.

The crew used filtration techniques to clear the water. But by the time they had been finished, it was too pure for human consumption.

“If you actually drank it,” Mark Callan, the deputy ice technician for the curling occasions, stated, “it would burn your insides.”

Outside, water freezes from the prime down, making a floor that’s wildly inconsistent. Inside, “you’ve got to go very slowly,” Callan stated, “and allow it to freeze the water from the bottom up.”

Once the higher layers freeze, white paint, logos and different markings are added. In all, the ice is 10 centimeters thick, or almost 4 inches.

The subsequent hurdle was the air. The constructing was too dry — “which is a bit ironic,” Callan stated, “being we’re in a swimming pool.”

The crew put in a system of humidifiers releasing a continuing mist round the periphery of the ice. That nonetheless wasn’t sufficient. Wuthrich took delight in the resolution: filling a smaller pool not removed from the ice with sizzling water. “Everyone thinks we are absolutely crazy,” he stated in a post on Twitter, together with {a photograph} exhibiting it off.

Even after the ice is frozen to their specs, the technicians proceed fussing over particulars, monitoring the ice and the environment round it at a granular degree: too heat, too chilly, an excessive amount of moisture, too little moisture, not sufficient texture for the stone to glide. Any deviation can have an outsize impression on the competitors.

“We work within a thousandth of an inch of accuracy,” Wuthrich stated after his crew completed the ice for a spherical of ladies’s matches.

The precision of the work contradicts a notion that so far as Olympic sports activities go, curling is straightforward. The sport is extensively accessible, and in newbie golf equipment, members go for a beer and a superb time.

But at the Olympic degree, it’s pushed by athleticism and technique, and the potential to learn and know the ice is a key to successful. As a lot as the brooms and the stones, it’s about the ice.

“It’s a game of skill, not a game of chance,” Callan stated. “So if you can’t provide consistent conditions, then you start to negate the skill level, and it becomes more of a game of chance — and it’s our job to make sure that’s not the case.”

Wuthrich and Callan — together with a 3rd ice technician, Shawn Olesen — had been drawn to this area of interest profession by a ardour for curling. They have day jobs. Wuthrich, who lives in Manitoba, owns a landscaping firm and nursery; Callan, who lives in Glasgow, Scotland, is the director of gross sales for the firm that makes the stones used in elite curling occasions by mining granite from an island off Scotland.

As a lot as they discover the work satisfying, in addition they acknowledge the stress that comes with it.

“It’s the pinnacle of everything, and as an ice maker, it’s the same thing,” Wuthrich stated of the Olympics. “You’ve got to be on your toes all the time. If any little thing happens, you have to fix it. You have to make it the best possible because people tried for 20 years to get to this event.”

One night time, earlier than the day’s final spherical of video games, the three technicians — together with a crew of almost two dozen Chinese volunteers, most of them faculty college students — went by their ice preparation routine.

The crew used an ice scraper to even out the lanes. Callan wore a backpack with a canister of water and a sprayer that seemed like a bathe head. Strutting backward on the lanes, he sprayed droplets of water to create the texture that enables the stones to maneuver throughout the flat floor and spin.

Then they took out a contraption referred to as a rock mover, which allowed them to rake a line of curling stones throughout the ice to simulate play. They need the ice to be damaged in for the gamers.

In a ultimate step, Callan went out with a single stone and examined it. Under the phrases of their contract, they’ve to supply ice on which a stone can transfer 4 to 5 toes in 24 to 25 seconds. They goal to maintain the floor temperature of the ice at roughly 23 levels Fahrenheit.

The days are lengthy and getting longer. They arrived in Beijing a month in the past, and there have been over a dozen days of competitors, with as many as three rounds of video games per day. On the job, Wuthrich walks about 10 kilometers a day; as a result of he does the texture pebbling, Callan will get in 12 kilometers.

They begin every morning at 6. Lately, issues have stored creeping up, that means they’re typically working till 1 a.m.

On Monday night time, as the South Korea ladies’s crew was working towards a 5-point lead over Japan, Wuthrich walked away from the ice and sat again for a second. He imagined himself house in Manitoba, his two black Labrador retrievers nestled on both aspect of him. He savored the thought, however went again inside, the place the curlers had been deep in competitors, strategizing and shouting.

His eyes had been on the ice.