Located in Gangneung Olympic Park, Gangneung Ice Arena is one of the six newly-built venues for PyeongChang 2018. It was the first of the three ice venues built in Gangneung to be completed at the end of December 2016, well in advance for the 2018 competitions. During the winter Olympics it will host the figure skating and short track speed skating events and will then remain as a permanent legacy facility for local recreational use after the games’ conclusion. The Gangneung Ice Arena has a capacity of 12,000 seats and houses two 60m x 30m ice rinks, for competition and training purposes, respectively. With four aboveground and two underground floors, this state-of-the-art venue has been engineered to use a ground-breaking environmentally-friendly ice cooling system, perfectly in line with the green guidelines of the building. Moreover, the venues will be reached by a brand new bullet train, which will connect them to Seoul airport in less than 70 minutes.
Unlike the Rio Summer Games, where workers were applying final touches even as the Opening Ceremony got under way, the PyeongChang Organizing Committee has confirmed that the completion rate for its six new venues is already 100% with a few months still to go. The first test event, the ISU World Cup Short Track Speed Skating, was held in December 2016 at the new Gangneung Ice Arena and 24 more test events have already been scheduled for the next winter sports season in order to check the perfect functioning of the facilities and their structures before the games start.
