The Yang Fang Dian Primary School, located in Beijing’s Haidian district, hosted today its 14th annual Olympic Culture Day. Under the title of “Our Olympics”, the school students made impassioned presentations of different aspects and recent editions of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, before taking an active part in a range of sports activities, from judo and aerobics to soccer, Taekwondo, basketball and even a mock Dragon boat race. Special guests included the Beijing Guoan Football Club players who showed the school’s little football fans their best kicks. In light of Beijing’s bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics, this year’s festival included such winter-sport-themed additions as a showcase of dry-land training for cross-country skiing.
The school, which was founded in 1945 and currently hosts around 1,200 students of primary and secondary school ages, was the first ever school in China to carry out a comprehensive Olympic education program into its curriculum in 2001, following Beijing’s announcement that it was bidding to host the 2008 Olympic Summer Games. It has also put a special focus on sport education, providing students with an access to a wide range of sports activities, introducing them to the values of sport and organizing international exchange programmes with similar-minded primary and secondary schools in Germany and in Great Britain.
After leading a successful bid for the London 2012 Summer Olympics, Britain’s Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Tessa Jowell paid a visit to the school, making the following observation: “Yang Fang Dian is not a school designed for athletics purposes, nor are these students training to become athletes at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Rather, it is more like your everyday primary school, with the exception that everything the kids do here embodies the Olympic values of unity and friendship…Thank you for helping to make the Olympic ideals a reality.”
Additionally, as a member of the IOC Commission for Olympic Education and Culture, Dr. Norbert Muller visited Yang Fang Dian in 2007, remarking that “Olympism is alive and can be found in all corners of this school. The implementation of Olympic education here is simply outstanding.” This year, in support of China’s aspiration to encourage a greater participation in winter sports, the school introduced special weekly classes where students have been invited to research information and make presentations about past Winter Games as well as various winter sports on the Olympic programme, all the while learning more about Olympic values and cultures of the recent and imminent Olympic Winter Games host countries, from Italy to Canada, and from Russia to South Korea.
In January 2015, the school also organized a special outing for its students to a ski resort in Zhangjiakou, the area bordering the Chinese capital from the North, which seeks to host the snow events of the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games. It was an occasion for the kids and their parents to learn more about the Beijing 2022 Bid and to get a personal taste of such winter sports as alpine skiing and snowboarding, supported by the teachers and ski instructors. The school students were also introduced to skiing safety and etiquette.
In turn, the school also hosted a seminar for teachers and educators from Zhangjiakou to share best practices of introducing Olympic classes in the school programme. School children shared their excitement about winter sports, saying that after watching the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games on television last year some of them went skiing several times in the mountains with their parents.
Gu Zhenrong, an 8-year-old school student said: “If Beijing hosts Olympic Winter Games, it will bring the entire world to Beijing! Can you imagine how fun it would be?”
Li Dongju, the Yang Fang Dian School’s Principal said: “Through the implementation of Olympic education, we here at Yang Fang Dian have held true to our school’s twin principles of “harmony” – achieved through friendship and teamwork – and “transcendence” – or, surpassing what we previously regarded as our own personal limits. Throughout this journey of Olympics education that begin in 2001, our teachers and students have worked together to create champions of tomorrow.”
Today, the Yang Fang Dian school is one of the thousands of schools and universities across China that integrate regular classes or special courses around Olympic values and sports awareness in their curriculums – as a direct result and one of the most significant intangible legacies of the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympic Games. As it stands, the Chinese Government has successful programs such as the “300 Million People Winter Sports Plan” aimed at enhancing public knowledge about and participation in winter sports, aswell as the “One Million Youth on Ice and Snow Programme” which provides free or low-priced access to winter sports facilities and competitions.
Beijing 2022 aims to capitalize on this legacy and to take it to the next level by launching educational activities around the Olympic Values and winter sports knowledge in over 300 thousand educational institutions from primary schools to universities across China, producing special educational materials and launching an online Olympic Winter Games education resources platform, supported by social media and webinar channels.
Wang Hui, Director of Communications of the Beijing 2022 Bid Committee, said: “Beijing 2022 will provide for a wide-ranging extension of the Olympic school education program nation-wide, with millions of kids and teenagers offered opportunities to practice winter sports and to learn about the Olympic and Paralympic values. We are confident that, building on the highly successful Beijing 2008’s legacy, Beijing 2022 will bring endless new opportunities for both the Olympic Movement and China”.