On November 14, the Xinjiang Extreme Sports Club held the 2015-2016 snow season board meeting, with over 300 attendees — the largest turnout in its history.
The growth of the Xinjiang Extreme Sports Club has gone hand in hand with the development of the China Xinjiang Winter Tourism Industry Trade Fair (hereinafter referred to as the Winter Expo). According to incomplete statistics, over the past ten Winter Expos, the number of skiing enthusiasts in Urumqi has grown nearly tenfold.
The Xinjiang Extreme Sports Club is a snowboarding-focused club in Urumqi. When it was founded in 2006, it had only a dozen or so members, but now it has more than 200.
According to Xiao Ji, the founder of the Xinjiang Extreme Sports Club, there weren’t many snowboarders in Xinjiang at first, and the club was established so that everyone could get together regularly. Later, as more people joined, the number of activities increased. Now, there’s not only a pre-season board meeting but also a post-season board retirement gathering.
As participation grew, the scale and quality of the board meetings gradually improved, attracting more sponsors and drawing increasing attention to the potential of this field. Xiao Ji told reporters that the 2015 board meeting collaborated with Red Bull Xinjiang, China Vanke Xinjiang, several physical retail stores, and even featured the international ski blockbuster film *2032*, which had its premiere at the event.
Reporters learned that there are several other ski clubs in Xinjiang of similar size, some focusing on snowboarding and others on alpine skiing. Skiing has brought considerable “white economy” benefits to Xinjiang.
Reporters did the math: currently, the best-equipped ski resort in Urumqi charges around 260 yuan for a single day ticket, and when adding transportation and lunch, the total cost is about 320 yuan. For skiing enthusiasts, a typical season involves 10–20 outings, with total expenses ranging from 4,000 to 6,000 yuan.
During the 2015 Spring Festival golden week, Urumqi’s ski resorts received an average of over 30,000 visitors per day. Of those, more than 10,000 were directly participating in skiing.
In addition, avid skiers often want their own gear. Snowboards, bindings, and boots are the most basic hardware setup. Top-tier brand snowboards range from 2,500 to 4,000 yuan, while mid-to-high-end models exceed 4,000 yuan; boots and bindings cost between 1,500 and 3,000 yuan. A full set of gear can range from a few thousand yuan to tens of thousands.
Seeing the “white economy” driven by skiing, Xiao Ji also started a ski gear business. In recent years, his sales have grown from just a few tens of thousands of yuan per season to several hundred thousand, increasing more than tenfold.
Xiao Ji believes that Xinjiang’s skiing market has great potential for development. After years of cultivation, more and more young people are taking up the sport. But for skiing to become widespread, it still needs government support and cooperation from ski resorts.
Some skiing enthusiasts have also expressed the hope that local ski resorts will improve their hardware facilities and enhance supporting services such as dining and accommodation. This would help attract more skiers from outside Xinjiang, thereby boosting the development of the region’s winter tourism industry.
“New Tourism · New Winter Expo” is the slogan proposed for this year’s Winter Expo. By leveraging market-based operations to attract more participants, the goal is both to boost the expo’s visibility and to increase public engagement in Xinjiang’s winter tourism.
What skiers are most looking forward to is for the Winter Expo to drive the development of winter tourism, ultimately improving the Xinjiang ice and snow industry chain — making skiing conditions better, costs lower, and encouraging more people to take up the sport. (Liu Wenwen)