By Hritika Sharma
BEIJING (Reuters) – Turning an Olympic-size swimming pool into a perfect rink for the world’s best curlers was only the start of the challenge for ice-making experts ahead of the Beijing Olympics.
On Saturday, the results of their efforts will be on display once again when Sweden take on Britain in the men’s final at the National Aquatics Centre.
“It’s an absolutely incredible engineering achievement,” Mark Callan, a senior ice technician with the World Curling Federation (WCF), told Reuters.
“Every building has its own little quirks … but the fact that this one was a swimming pool has made it unusually challenging for us.”
The distinctive venue, which was built to stage the swimming as the “Water Cube” during the 2008 Summer Olympics, was been transformed into the “Ice Cube” for the Winter Games.
Ice makers started by building the near-four inch thick sheet two or three millimetres at a time, adding paint and logos once the upper layers freeze and using de-ionised water to remove impurities, before levelling it with an ice scraper.
The perfectly smooth surface is sprayed with water droplets – known as ‘pebbles’ – to allow the stones to curl their way towards the target area.
The four different sheets at the Ice Cube need to be as closely matched as possible to provide a level playing field across the whole event, which is the busiest at these Games with 19 straight days of competition.
“They’ve done a good job,” said Sweden men’s skip Niklas Edin. “It’s really consistent, which is what we look for. As long as it’s consistent, we will adapt.”
During the men’s, women’s and mixed doubles group stages, there were as many as three sessions per day and up to four matches on each sheet. The ice needs resurfacing after every session.
“We’re here at around six in the morning, and we’re home again by about 11:30 at night — on a good day,” Callan said. “It’s a painstaking process but quite rewarding in the end.”
One of the “quirks” of the venue that Callan and the other ice makers – fellow deputy Shawn Olesen and chief technician Hans Wuthrich – have had to deal with is the exceptionally dry air.
The team installed humidifiers along the perimeter of the ice to maintain moisture levels, but that proved insufficient with cold air coming in through one of the doors. The innovative solution for that was to fill up a hot tub not far from the ice.
“Everyone thinks we are absolutely crazy,” Wuthrich wrote on Twitter.
COVID CHALLENGE
The COVID-19 pandemic has added another layer of preparation to the ice makers’ already intricately detailed process.
The ice temperature along with humidity and air pressure inside the arena are continually monitored to ensure they remain within a precise range, but the machines controlling these factors function most efficiently with capacity crowds.
They first tackled this issue during last year’s world championships, which were played behind closed doors in Calgary, and the near-empty venue in Beijing meant the team had to know the number of spectators every day before setting the values.
“We started to set this up in 2018, before the pandemic was even a thing,” Callan said. “We have very restricted numbers because of the current situation so that makes the job of controlling the environment a little bit more challenging.
“And if the floor is not perfect, the stones are not perfect, then you’re introducing some variables into the whole equation. It’s a game of skill, you don’t want it to be a game of chance.”
(Reporting by Hritika Sharma; Editing by Ken Ferris)
