OlymPicks: An Olympic Skater Who Wants to Be a Brain Surgeon, and a China Airlines Plane Gets a Makeover

In OlymPicks, we highlight news, gossip, and developments regarding the buildup to Beijing's 2022 Winter Olympics.

A career in neurosurgery is next for this 2022 figure skater

There’s a trope of the successful athlete who doesn’t know what to do with themselves after age chips away at their physical prowess, but at age 17, Aliona Kostornaia has already determined that that won’t be her story. True, she has big plans for 2022, but she has even bigger plans for her career after the Beijing Olympics.

“Figure skating is not a sport where you can skate for 30 years and still win,” she said from her home during a remote interview with the Olympic Channel. “Because there are 15-year-old girls who produce a bunch of quadruples. They have a lot of power and energy and no one is stopping them.”

Kostornaia has already made her mark on the world of figure skating. She is just the tenth woman ever to land a triple Axel jump at an international competition, and she has set multiple world records for high scores in the ladies’ short program event. But after 2022, she will shift from her intensive skate training to training for a very different – though no less precise – profession.

“I’ll finish out this season, then I’ll finish out the Olympic season,” she says. “Then, I’ll go to pursue my dream of becoming a neurosurgeon.”

Korean lugers will soon hit the ice once more

Though Beijing is still planning to hold the 2022 Olympics on schedule, training for the games had more than a few wrenches thrown into its machinery by the COVID-19 pandemic. Early last month, in fact, the Latvian national team manager said it would be “Almost impossible” to hold a full luge event schedule. Nonetheless, the South Korean team is determined to reinstate practices, even if international competitions are impossible for the time being. The team plans to resume on-ice practice in October, according to Inside the Games.

When the winter games were held in South Korea in 2018, the luge events were dominated by Austria, Germany, Canada, and the US, so the peninsular nation must take advantage of the practice time if they’re going to stay competitive. The country resumed practice for individual events in May, but athletes in team events have had to wait.

China Airlines plane gets an Olympic paint job

A China Airlines aircraft got an Olympic makeover, according to CTGN – although we still haven’t seen any photographs of the finished project. We do know, however, that the paint job is real and not just a rumor because, in their eternally superior wisdom of what makes good content, the state media company live-streamed eleven minutes of workers ambling around the aircraft as it stood in a hangar in Beijing Capital Airport, surrounded by scaffolding, the paint job mostly finished and the waving panda Olympic mascot visible.

Regardless, given that the plane was painted at Beijing Capital, it's reasonable to expect that it will be flying in and out of it, so keep your eyes peeled when you head out for your October Holiday travels.

READ: OlymPicks: Winter Games Get Yummy with KFC, Pizza Hut as Sponsors after Mcdonalds Backs Down

Images: Olympic Channel, fslessons, CGTN