WUHAN, Feb. 15 (Xinhua) -- Construction of the athletes village for the 2019 Military World Games continues on Thursday in the host city Wuhan. This is happening while construction workers elsewhere in the booming Chinese metropolis are taking a break during the Spring Festival celebrations.
"Most of the 2,000-plus workers here have gone home for the holiday. About 200 of them stay and go on working because we are a bit behind schedule due to the strong snowfalls that hit the city in January," said Yin Tianming, a project manager involved with the project.
The athletes' village, which is worth 4.5 billion yuan (714 million US dollars) and built to meet the standards of the Beijing Olympic Village, is comprised of 30 high-rise buildings up to 32 stories tall with a total of 2,226 apartments.
During the Spring Festival, the workers will begin building walls for the high-rise buildings, whose structures reached full height not long ago, Yin said.
The construction of the village began in April last year and will wrap up in June 2019. The village will accommodate approximately 11,000 people from more than 100 countries and regions during the 7th Military World Games, a multi-sport event for military sportspeople.
The village, situated by a scenic lake on the southern outskirts of Wuhan, will be sold as high-end condos after the Games.
The Military World Games, first held in Rome in 1995, is organized every four years by the International Military Sports Council. Approximately 8,000 athletes are expected to participate in the Wuhan Games, which features 329 events in 27 sports including naval pentathlon, aeronautical pentathlon, basketball and swimming. The event will kick off in October 2019.
