Supporting winter sports athletes from across the world
The New Horizons Academy fulfils a commitment made during the bid stage to support and develop athletes from Asia and further afield, primarily from countries with no tradition of winter sports. Funded by the PyeongChang 2018 Legacy Foundation, it provides world-class training in snow and ice sports at PyeongChang 2018 venues and offers cultural and educational activities.
In preparation for the Gangwon 2024 Winter Youth Olympic Games, the Academy invited 177 athletes from 21 countries in Africa, South America and South-East Asia to the Republic of Korea for two-week camps in June and December 2022 and gave them the chance to try out different winter sports. Local coaches, each of whom had competed at PyeongChang 2018, then analysed their performance, allocating a specific winter sport to each athlete, which they then worked on in a training programme that ran through to February 2023.
After attending the Academy, some 25 athletes from nine National Olympic Committees and covering five sports went on to compete at Gangwon 2024. Two of them – Agnese Campeol of Thailand and Jonathan Lourimi of Tunisia – won silver medals in monobob. Lourimi was one of three Academy graduates from Tunisia to appear in bobsleigh events at the YOG – the first time that the North African country has ever been represented at an Olympic winter event. The Academy is now training more young bobsleigh athletes in preparation for the upcoming Olympic Winter Games.
The Academy programme also includes a cultural tour of Gangwon State, classes on Korean culture, calligraphy and K-pop, and courses on topics such as anti-doping, sexual harassment and safeguarding in sport.
The Academy builds on the success of the New Horizons Sliding Champions programme, which is laying the foundation for the future of sliding sports in the Republic of Korea and Asia as a whole. The programme seeks to develop young athletes in bobsleigh and skeleton and bring about the creation of national sliding sport federations in some of the attendees’ home countries.