With 100 days until the start of the Winter Olympics, Beijing is promising a “simple and safe” 2022 Games – although preparations are anything but simple as China readies to host thousands of athletes and personnel as it battles COVID-19 flare-ups.
Beijing will be the first city to stage both the Summer and Winter Games, but the 2022 event is shadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and calls from human rights groups for a boycott over China’s treatment of Tibet, Uyghur Muslims and Hong Kong.
The Games will run Feb. 4 to 20, with all participants subject to daily COVID-19 tests and no international spectators. Unlike this year’s Tokyo Summer Games local spectators will be allowed at events in and around the Chinese capital.
Athletes and other Games-related personnel will be enveloped in a “closed loop” including three clusters of venues – one in downtown Beijing, one in the outskirts near the Great Wall, and one to the northwest of the city, in Hebei province.
While COVID-19 will be the “biggest challenge to holding the Winter Olympics”, epidemic control measures will work, Zhang Jiandong, Beijing’s vice mayor, told a Wednesday briefing.
“Please don’t worry,” he added.
Unlike the Tokyo Games, which were delayed by a year and stalked by speculation they would be cancelled, there has been little doubt the Beijing Winter Olympics will take place – no matter what – as an increasingly assertive China seizes the opportunity to demonstrate soft power.
Still, the countdown comes as China, with some of the world’s most stringent COVID-19 controls, manages small Delta variant outbreaks. The Beijing and Wuhan marathons were recently postponed, with curbs on travel into the capital announced due to dozens of daily new cases.
Such restrictions have contributed to a lack of the anticipatory buzz that marked the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics – an extravaganza widely seen as China’s global coming-out party.
IOL
