For Beijing's chief hockey ice maker, it's all about the layers

BEIJING : Most fans at an ice hockey game devote their attention to the whizzing puck and crunching body checks.

Rick Ragan fixates on the frozen white surface on which the action takes place.

"I'm watching how the ice is getting cut up, how much snow is getting made. I'm taking the temperature of the ice as the game is going on," he said.

It is that discerning eye for ice that landed the 48-year-old Minnesota native his job as chief ice maker for the main ice hockey venue at the 2022 Winter Olympics, the Wukesong Arena, which also hosted basketball during the 2008 Summer Games.

Ice hockey was first played on frozen lakes and ponds, but the making of artificial rinks has grown into a science.

"Can anybody make ice? Honestly, yes - you go throw a hose on a frozen floor, you're going to make ice. But it's doing those little things that's going to make it the best ice," Ragan said.

Those things include understanding how different minerals affect the "hardness" of the water, and making adjustments for different sports.

For example, ice for figure skating needs to be relatively soft to cushion the falls, Ragan said, while for speed skating, it needs to be harder. Ice hockey played at the Paralympics requires thicker ice.

"Every sport likes it a little different ... so it's a lot of differences working with the refrigeration systems in each building to get the floor warmer or colder," said Ragan, who also worked on the ice at the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Ice-making can take several days - it took just over a week at Wukesong - requiring the repeated flooding of the rink to create layer after layer.

"For this event, we built ice to 1 cm, painted it white, put a few more coats of water on that, painted all the