Sports Event City, Connecting the World: Beijing Accelerates Building a World-Class Sports Host City

BEIJING, Sept. 11, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On September 10, the 2026 CIFTIS Sports Services Section Main Forum & Conference on Building World-Class Sports Host Cities and High-Quality Development of the Sports Event Economy was held at Shougang Park in Beijing. Under the theme "Sports Event City, Connecting the World," government representatives, heads of international sports organisations, experts and scholars, and diplomatic envoys from China, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Argentina, France, and other countries gathered to discuss how sports events can serve as a link connecting cities, industries, and the world.

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Beijing is the world's first "Dual Olympic City," with a rich legacy of sports event resources and mature, comprehensive capabilities in hosting major events. In recent years, Beijing has continued to introduce high-level international and domestic top-tier events, adhering to the approach of using sports events to drive industry and boost consumption, accelerating the building of a leading international sports host city, and actively exploring a path for sports event city development that fits the city's realities and carries distinctive Beijing characteristics.

At the forum, Olympic champions Chen Yibing and He Kexin presented 11 major international sports events coming to Beijing in autumn and winter, spanning traditional competitive sports, ice and snow sports, emerging sports, and digital sports. Top-tier events including the 2026-2027 FIS Snowboard and Freestyle Ski Big Air World Cup, the 2026 GT World Challenge Asia, and the Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) Beijing 2026 will all take the stage, fully unleashing the comprehensive value of Dual Olympic venues and activating the vitality of autumn and winter sports consumption.

In the roundtable dialogue session, participants agreed that a true sports event city is by no means one that simply pursues the number and scale of events, but rather one that promotes the deep integration of sports events into urban development strategies, public service development, and residents' daily lives - ensuring that the value of sports events transcends the arena and becomes an endogenous force driving long-term urban development.

In her closing remarks, Zhou Ling, Member of the Party Leadership Group and Deputy Director of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Sports, said that this forum is an important practice in implementing the strategy of building a sporting powerhouse and advancing the building of Beijing as a world-class sports host city. In the future, Beijing will give full play to the unique advantages of its Dual Olympic legacy, continue to deepen international sports exchanges and cooperation, promote the expansion and upgrading of sports services trade and raise its level of internationalisation, and contribute transferable "Beijing experience" for the high-quality development of the sports industry.

Contact person: Ms. Zhu, Tel: 86-10-63074558