Smart clothing to keep athletes warm at Games

Hoping to ride on the back of the forthcoming Winter Olympics, sportswear companies are introducing innovative new and high-tech products aimed at keeping people warm in the colder weather.

At a recent snowboarding and freestyle skiing test event held in Genting Snow Park, one of the 2022 Winter Olympics venues, staff and officials were shielded from the bitter cold by wearing not just insulated clothing, but clothing embedded with small heating elements.

At the snow park in Zhangjiakou, Hebei province, temperatures can fall as low as-40 C.

The heated scarves, gloves and socks were developed by Aika, a high-tech company based in Beijing, that focuses on researching graphene as an innovative fashion material.

Graphene is a honeycomb lattice of a single layer of carbon atoms that has a great variety of uses and applications.

Aika cooperated with the Beijing Institute of Graphene& Technology in the research and development of intelligently heated graphene-made products, China Intellectual Property News quoted He Hongying, secretary of the company's board of directors, as saying.

The temperature of the graphene material can be adjusted in multiple ways, including via an app on a mobile phone, to within a single degree.

The graphene properties in the clothes can withstand being washed up to 50 times, He said.

Toread, an outdoor clothing brand headquartered in Beijing, has also invested in developing innovative winter clothes.

Centering on the actual needs from the athletes who will participate in the Beijing Winter Olympics, as well as its support personnel, the company has made breakthroughs in core technologies used in low-temperature-resistant clothes, Han Ye, an executive of brand management at the company, told Beijing Youth Daily.

Their research achievements include the development of a light yet warm flock fiber in a goose-down-like structure, Han said.

Xinhua News Agency reports show that 26 listed Chinese sports garment and equipment companies together spent more than 3.2 billion yuan on research and development in 2020, an increase of 6.55 percent year-on-year, despite the global economic slowdown.

The increased R&D spending indicates their faith in the market prospects and the upgrading momentum of the sector, industrial insiders said.

According to an industrial development plan issued by nine central government departments, including the General Administration of Sport and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China's ice and snow equipment sector is projected to generate more than 20 billion yuan ($3.12 billion) in 2022, at an average annual increase of more than 20 percent during the 2019-22 period.

With a growing population of skiers in China, consumer demand is becoming more personalized and diverse, which will spur upgrading and accelerated development in the ice and snow sports equipment industry, Lin Xianpeng from the School of Management at Beijing Sport University, told Beijing-based Consumption Daily.

Data from an industry report shows that the industrial scale of China's ice and snow businesses expanded from 270 billion yuan in 2015 to 600 billion yuan in 2020. The amount is projected to reach the 1 trillion yuan benchmark in 2025, according to the forecast from a winter sports development plan for the 2016-25 period.