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The Winter Olympics are a global Games for athletes, but that’s also true of the people working behind the scenes at Beijing 2022.
Canadians Mark Peter Messer and Matthew James Messer are the men responsible for ice making at the National Speed Skating Oval.
Both worked on the ice in PyeongChang in 2018, and four years later they’ve been intent on providing record-breaking surfaces.
But, Mark — widely regarded as the finest ice-maker on the planet — believes that the ice in the National Speed Skating Oval is even faster than the one they made in South Korea, as evidenced by the fact a number of Olympic speed skating records have already been broken in Beijing.
“We have been very successful with our records,” he said during a press conference. “We have records in almost every distance. We’re getting very good feedback from the athletes and from the coaches that we have made a good surface for them to perform on.”
A process that began almost immediately after the last Winter Olympics, they have been working with a small team from Canada alongside local ice-makers in China to ensure the ice is maintained after the games.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic struck.
“As the pandemic started to hit, we started doing longer trips but less work, because we would do quarantining before and quarantining when we got back to Canada, so it created some challenges there, for sure,” said Mark.
“Some of the trips we would have done, we didn’t do because of the restrictions. So we did more work over Zoom calls and technology calls.
“We had some challenges, for sure. We did not have a lot of experience before the Games where we could learn. Usually, if you open a building, it takes you three or four or five years to really understand how everything works together.
“There are the effects of the air, the effects of the humidity, the lights, the people that come in. There are many…
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Source : cnn
