(Zhangjiakou) Émilie, the mountain medal magnet, couldn’t believe it so much that she bet a beer. She even inquired at the press center to make sure I was telling the truth.
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
Yes, from our hotel, you can clearly see the Great Wall of China. In the evening, it is lit with a luminous ribbon. Following him, we would arrive at the national cross-country ski center, where Norway’s Therese Johaug won her second gold medal by four tenths on Thursday.
These remains of the Wall are so close that it would be easy to reach them on foot in a few tens of minutes. Unfortunately, it is impossible to get out of our “closed loop”.
I have run through the area a few times, a matter of maybe 2.5 km. It is fenced from one end to the other. The only opening on the road is guarded by a barrier which goes up and down to the passage of buses and accredited cars. In sentry boxes, friendly policemen stand guard day and night.
The “loop” contains three hotels, in a Club Med that has just been completed. Ours directly overlooks Thaiwoo Ski Resort, one of the largest in China, opened in 2015. 510m drop (slightly less than Owl’s Head), 20km of slopes, four lifts and 20 mats for beginners. Its summit points to 2160 m.
From my room on the eighth floor, I sometimes hear a snow groomer redoing the corduroy of the slopes. However, Thaiwoo is hopelessly closed since it is in the “loop”. When it gets dark, multicolored lights flicker down a slope. It’s nice when you have insomnia.
Snow is practically non-existent outside the slopes. On the other side, a mogul course is freshly laid out in the middle of nowhere. It has hosted a World Cup since 2017. Mikaël Kingsbury has scored seven victories there in eight starts. The other time, he finished second.
Immaculate on our arrival, the white ribbon of the mogul track has taken on a sandy color for a few days, probably the fault of the wind blowing from the Gobi desert, which extends to Mongolia on the other side of the Wall.
Thaiwoo, advertised in large Hollywood-style white letters on one side, offers a stunning view of the Zhangjiakou Great Wall. The city-prefecture encompasses a total of 1476 km of the famous work and 1000 watchtowers. The largest, oldest – some were built between 475 and 221 BC – and best-preserved sections of China are found here. For this reason, Zhangjiakou is nicknamed the “Great Walls Museum”.
We will have to continue to observe them from afar, a Tsingtao in hand.