Asian Winter Games to be held in Trojena, Saudi Arabia in 2029!

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Saudi Arabia has won the right to host the Asian Winter Games in 2029.

The Games will take place in Trojena, Neom city, a planned mountain resort that is due to be completed in 2026.

Surrounded by the Sarawat mountains, temperatures are cooler in the region and it aims to be a year-round destination for winter sports.

Neom chief executive Nadhmi Al-Nasr said the venue "will have a suitable infrastructure to create the winter atmosphere in the heart of the desert".

The tourist destination will have the Gulf's first outdoor ski resort, a man-made freshwater lake and is planned to be powered by renewable energy.

There will be natural snow on the mountains but some artificial snow will also be used.

It is the latest event to be hosted by Saudi Arabia as they increase their presence in sport - leading to accusations the country is using sport to enhance its reputation following criticism over its human rights record.

In August, British boxer Anthony Joshua fought Oleksandr Usyk in the city of Jeddah, while the controversial LIV Golf league is funded by Saudi Arabia.

In October 2021, a Saudi Arabian-backed £305m takeover of Newcastle United was completed.

The decision to host a winter sports event in Saudi Arabia has drawn criticism too. Madeleine Orr, from Loughborough University's Sport Ecology Group, told BBC Sport: "From a business standpoint, it makes complete sense to go to a new market and try to grow winter sport there."

But she added: "These growth goals are antithetical to environmental goals: there's no version of a winter sport event in Saudi Arabia that will be sustainable as it will require enormous water and energy resources, indoor sport spaces and an insane amount of travel."

BBC

 

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Saudi Arabia just won a bid to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games. The location? A development that doesn't yet exist, within a futuristic city that doesn't yet exist.

"The deserts and mountains of Saudi Arabia will soon be a playground for winter sports," the Olympic Council of Asia, or OCA, said in a statement, as quoted by the AFP.

The planned mountain resort of Neom will be the event's venue, Saudi Arabia said. The $500 billion city is expected to accommodate up to 9 million residents by 2045, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman – who's the chairman of Neom's board – said in July. Neom is expected to cover over 16,5000 square kilometres, making it bigger than Israel or Kuwait, per a February report by the BBC.

The games are slated to take place in Trojena, a development within Neom that includes a year-round ski complex, a freshwater lake, and luxury hotels, according to Neom's official website. Trojena is about 50 kilometres from the Saudi coastline and winter temperatures are often below freezing.

But, like the rest of Neom, Trojena doesn't exist yet; it's slated to be completed in 2026, per the AFP.

The project is one of the most controversial in Saudi history.

Planners, architects, and economists have expressed skepticism about the feasibility of Neom, which touts technologies that don't yet exist.
Some of the plans that have raised eyebrows include incorporating flying taxis, robot maids, and a "giant artificial moon" into the project, according to a 2019 report by the Wall Street Journal.

The construction of Neom was announced in 2017.

Five years after the project was announced, it's unclear to what degree construction has been completed. The city has a residential camp of 2,000 employees, according to a July report by Bloomberg. The residential camp, called Neom Community 1, is made up of "neat lawns and identical white homes" the size of shipping containers, which the report compared to "a Google campus and a minimum security prison."

"I was not alone in realising that it was spurious at best," Andy Wirth, an American hospitality executive who worked on Neom in 2020, told Bloomberg. "The complete absence of being tethered to reality, objectively, is what was demonstrated there."

The Asian Winter Games are held every four years. Saudi Arabia stands to be the first West Asian country to host the event, which was most recently held in Sapporo, Japan, in 2017.

https://www.businessinsider.co.za/saudi-arabia-500-billion-city-asian-winter-games-2022-10