Shunyi Olympic Rowing-Canoeing Park

Slalom course

The slalom course is generally considered difficult, even by Olympic standards. Its water speed is 7.5 meters/second, and with a drop of 6.3 meters over 300 meters, the course has a 2.1% slope of 20.9 m/km. Electric pumps power the course, which sits at the southwest corner of the long rectangular rowing pond and draws water from it. The western loop serves as the competition course, while the eastern loop, with branches, is used for training and warmup.

Conveyor-belt boat lifts carry paddlers to the start pool. The green and red numbers on the map indicate the gate configuration used for the finals at the 2008 Olympics. There were six upstream gates (red numbers): two in right eddies, three in left eddies, and gate #10, the S-turn gate, in the middle of the stream below a midstream stack of plastic bollards. Paddlers entered gate #10 from the left side and exited from the right.

The drop between gates #14 and #15 was called "stir fry". Gates #3 and #4 were both upstream gates, side by side below the same drop; paddlers performed a figure-8 maneuver, crossing the tongue of water produced by the drop to get from #3 to #4. This difficulty was added for the finals; earlier heats had #3 as a downstream gate above the drop, and gate #6 as an upstream gate to preserve the number of upstream gates. Six of the green downstream gates were wider than normal (2, 5, 8, 13, 15, and 19), with each pole hanging from its own wire to allow one pole to be farther downstream than the other.

The last picture in the gallery shows construction features that have recently become standard: vertical side walls (except for strategically placed slanted walls to dampen water oscillations), modular turbulence generators on the channel floor, and clusters of movable plastic bollards attached to the floor as water diverters. There are no concrete boulders in the channel.