The 2018 Olympics hosted in Pyeongchang, South Korea, will be the largest-ever winter Games
with athletes from more than 80 nations competing across 102 events.
A total of 12 venues will stage the spectacle, with six existing facilities being refurbished
and six being constructed from scratch. Here we take a look at the highlights.
These will be the second Olympics to have been held in South Korea – with Seoul hosting
the summer Games back in 1988 – and the first of three successive Games to be held in Asia,
with Tokyo following in 2020 and Beijing hosting the Winter Olympics in 2022.
Compared to the efforts of the recent host cities of Rio in Brasil and Sochi in Russia,
preparations for Pyeongchang have been a model of efficiency,
with the majority of venues complete six months before the Games.
The events are gathered around two main veunes. The Pyeongchang Mountain cluster,
focused on the Alpensia Resort, will host outdoor sports, while the coastal city of Gangneung,
some 20 kilometers east of the mountain, will host indoor sports.
At the heart of the Games will be the Pyeongchang Olympic Stadium; a temporary venue that will
seat 50,000 people for the opening and closing ceremonies.
The $78 million USD pentagonal arena will also host medal ceremonies.
After the Games, the stadium will be dismantled. Although this is unusual for a main Olympic Stadium,
a similar temporary facility was used during the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France.
Critically this means that after the games Pyeongchang will not be left with an expensive
white elephant that would be potentially unsuitable for a small resort.
One of the main venues at the Pyeongchang mountain cluster, the Alpensia Ski Jumping Centre
was originally planned as a spectacular venue for the opening and closing ceremonies.
Built in 2008, in anticipation of winning the rights to host the Winter Olympics,
the 11,000 seat venue will host the ski jumping and the Nordic combined events.
As the landing area for ski jumpers is approximately the same size as a football pitch,
the venue has also been designed for football in the summer months,
making this perhaps one of the world’s strangest football stadiums.
The $114.5 million USD Alpensia Sliding Centre is one of the six venues purpose built for the games.
The centre, that will host the bobsleigh, luge, and skeleton events, can accommodate 7,000 spectators.
The track has been constructed 2,018 meters long – commemorating the year of the Games.
While the construction of the venues has progressed on time, avoiding the controversy that over shadowed
the build-up to both Rio and Sochi, the choice of location for one venue has been extremely controversial.
The Jeongseon Alpine Centre is a new ski slope that will be home to the alpine speed events
of downhill, Super-G and combined.
The course is located in a 500-year-old protected forest on Gariwang Mountain, the only location
in the region that could meet Olympic requirements for a vertical drop of 2,600 feet (or 800 meters).
To allow the development to happen, the Korea Forestry Service controversially removed
the mountain from its list of protected forestland.
To minimize the damage to Mount Gariwang the men's and women's courses have been combined
into one field for the first time at a Winter Olympics.
In Gangneung, some 20 kilometers east of the PyeongChang Mountain Cluster,
three new venues are being constructed for the games.
With ice hockey making up an incredible 40% of the total ticket sales at a typical Winter Olympic Games,
the most popular of these will undoubtedly be the Gangneung Hockey Centre.
Costing $90 million USD, this is the first arena to have been specifically designed
and built for ice hockey in South Korea.
With a capacity of 10,000, the venue is designed to give spectators an up-close and personal
experience with the audience just 1.6 meters away from the rink.
A key part of Gangneung’s strategy to become a winter sports destination after the Olympics,
the Ice Arena will be the venue for short track and figure skating during the Games.
The arena has a capacity of 12,000 with an air maintenance system that keeps the spectator
area at a temperature of 59 Fahrenheit and 40 percent humidity.
This system can also control the temperature of the ice rink surface so that the venue
can stage both figure skating and short-track events on the same day.
The third purpose built venue in the Gangneung grouping, the Oval will host speed skating
competitions during the Olympics.
Effectively a giant shed, the building will be the largest pillar-less structure in South Korea,
offering 7,635 spectators uninterrupted views of the action.
Aware of the extremely high costs of previous Olympics, the budget for Pyeongchang has been
tightly controlled with the event set to cost an estimated $10BN USD;
a fraction of the eye-watering $50BN USD spent by Russia on the Sochi Games.
Unfortunately for architecture fans, this frugalness is reflected
in the unambitious pragmatic architecture of the venues.
However, if the Games are run as efficiently as the construction,
Pyeongchang looks set to be an extremely successful Olympics.
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