The member list of China national sailing and windsurfing team for the coming Paris 2024 Olympic Games were recently announced. Two athletes from Qingdao. Hu Xiaoyu, an athlete from Qingdao, will contend in the sailing 49erFX Women event, while Lv Yixiao, the other, will attend the 470 sailing. Qingdao’s efforts to train sailing athletes at their childhood have paid off.

As a city where the Olympic Sailing Games have been held, Qingdao has long  been making dedicated efforts to launch the initiative for including sailing into campus education. Wang Ziqi, an ambassador crew member for the 2023-2024 Clipper Round the World Yacht Race and a sailor in the whole course of “Qingdao” sailboat, used to study in the Wendeng Road Elementary School, which is among the first batch of elementary schools participating in the initiative. Hu Xiaoyu, chosen as a member of the China national team for the Paris Olympic Games, and Zhao Huancheng, who snatched a gold medal for mixed Nacra in the 2023 Hangzhou Asian Games, were both enlightened about sailing in Dunhua Road Elementary School.

In addition, a continuous sequence of sailing events, educational training sessions, and experience and exchange programs are all a testament to Qingdao citizens’ attachment to sailing.

Since the citywide sailing program named “Welcome to Qingdao for Sailing” was launched in 2010, more than 730,000 people have by far been attracted to experience sailing. The classroom for knowledge of sailing, which was initiated in 2019, has covered sailing-featured schools in nine districts or county-level cities in Qingdao. As guided by the Qingdao Five-Year Plan for Including Sailing into Campus Education (2021-2025), which was released in 2021, 132 sailing-featured colleges and universities and primary and middle schools will be built across Qingdao, which is on track to become China’s teenager sailing training base. The teenager sailing training program, which was in full swing in 2023, has trained a combined total of more than 41,000 teenagers.

The Clipper Round the World Yacht Race has arrived at the Qingdao stopover for nine consecutive times. Domestically famous events, such as the China Family Sailing Race and the China Sailing City Super League, as well as the "Fareast Cup" International Sailing Regatta, which are sponsored by Qingdao, have gained fame over time. According to statistics, more than 1 million citizens in Qingdao have by far tried sailing.  (Xu Nuo)

Sailboats dot in the Qingdao Olympic Sailing Center in summertime. By Wang Lei