What China wants, China gets, right down to the Winter Olympics

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/02/2022 (1337 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEIJING Citius. Altius. Fortius. And fortissimum.

Because, to hear tell it, none but the brave dare venture into Beijing for the XXIV Winter Olympics.

Pandemic, surveillance, hacked phones and computers, slave labour, egregious human rights violations, officialdom obduracy, diplomatic siege, gag orders for athletes, too cold, too warm, too Chinese.

To which the organizing committee and The People’s Republic of China have said: Stuff it.

Not the Games, of course. There was never any doubt these Olympics would proceed as scheduled, launching Friday. Just the moaning and the groaning and the sky-is-falling hysterics.

The International Olympic Committee got it foolishly wrong when Beijing was awarded the Games seven years ago. On the other hand, the runner-up — a mere four votes shy — was Almaty. So we could have been ducking deadly anti-government protests in Kazakhstan right now instead. Karim Massimov, the former prime minister who chaired Almaty’s Olympic bid, has since been arrested on suspicion of treason.

Given the state of the world these days — the Doomsday Clock has just been reset at 100 seconds to midnight — maybe the folly of a sporting spectacle is just what we need.

China has spent a whopping $3.9 billion to stage these Games. Frankly, a bargain; merely one-tenth of the bill from Beijing 2008, the country’s coming-out party as a superpower. They’ve got yuan coming out the yin-yang. This is their Olympic encore, with Beijing the first city to host both a Summer and Winter Games.

Of course the seemingly endless global COVID plague has forced a multitude of restrictions, bewildering “playbooks” and suffocating protocols. Which, also frankly, is just how China likes it, now having the justification of health and safety to buffer an iron fist. The IOC, scarcely registering a peep of dismay when Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai went ghostly silent in November after her social media allegation of sexual coercion by a high ranking Communist Party member, continues to assume the missionary position with Beijing. In his New Year’s message, IOC president Thomas Bach assured these Games would be “safe and secure” while reiterating that the Olympics and the IOC must be “beyond all political disputes.”

Ha. Ha. Ha. Pull the other one.

Fortunately, Bach and his Lords of the Rings posse will have no significance once the cauldron at Bird’s Nest Stadium is lit Friday, just six months after it was doused in Tokyo. The athletes — God bless the athletes, some 2,900 of them from more than 90 countries — will take centre stage to ski, skate, slide, snowboard and soar. (Watch for the return of Jamaica’s “Cool Runnings” bobsled team, and the island’s first Alpine skier).

It starts with an opening ceremony that will be scaled back (3,000 performers) and shorter than the breathtaking 2008 extravaganza. It is again directed by internationally acclaimed filmmaker Zhang Yimou, who has promised a compressed lollapalooza “different and unique.” As Zhang recently told the state-run news outlet Xinhua: “China’s status in the world, the image of the Chinese and the rise of our national status — everything is totally different now.”

A pandemic into its third year can hardly be underestimated, though official figures for new COVID cases in Beijing, as I wrote this, were listed at nine. Either the Chinese have brilliantly managed to curtail the Omicron variant and Zero COVID strategy — citywide lockdowns still are rigidly harsh — or they take the gold for mendacity. Which, frankly, is where we came in, back at the dawn of COVID-19, the untransparent origin story in Wuhan.

There are no foreign fans, as in Tokyo last summer, no family and friends to eyewitness competitions, and only a very restricted number of locals. In truth, not so different from 2008 when the Chinese public was mostly kept behind fencing, straining for a peek at the gorgeous venues. Then, as now, it was essentially The Forbidden City.

Clapping is OK, cheering is not — more plague stricture.

After China reported its first local case of Omicron on Jan. 15 in Tianjin — stamped out with another zip-up — the organizing committee announced no tickets would be sold to the Chinese public for any of the three sports clusters, distributed instead to “certain groups” not defined, who would still need to “abide by the COVID-19 countermeasures” for the event’s entirety.

As the hours ticked down to launch, athletes from across the planet were laying low, straining to stay clean and COVID-clear, barely chancing any risk that took them beyond training bubbles. Tests upon arrival are far more sensitive than a routine PCR and any detection of even a waning infection would see them quarantined, if not immediately turned around. The Games experience for some might never extend beyond the airport.

“The most fear of getting it I’ve ever had,” admitted snowboarder extraordinaire Mark McMorris, a gold-medal favourite for Canada. A year ago, he missed the X Games after testing positive.

Some athletes who have recently come through the COVID misery, including Canadian pairs figure skaters Vanessa James and Eric Radford, are actually heartened to be on the other side of infection, with heightened immunity. Those who recover from the virus within 30 days of departure for China must produce two negative PCR tests at least 24 hours before leaving, plus two more on separate days within 96 hours of boarding their flight. Yet another test at the Beijing airport.

The rigmarole has defeated many who were to be Beijing-bound. NBC, the official broadcaster, isn’t even sending announcers, just technical staff. Virtual coverage. Otherwise, it’s everybody — athletes, officials, media — into the “closed loop,” which will be far less tolerant of rogues and delinquents than Tokyo. Athletes village (or media hotel) to venue and back, cocooned inside designated buses and trains.

I’m not complaining. In fact, I’ve had a bellyful of the bellyachers. It is a privilege to bear witness at an Olympics; these are my 15th Games. Each has been magnificent, from teenager in awe to sexagenarian still in awe.

These are both newfangled and controversial, from robot chefs at the main press centre delivering food from an overhead grid to accusations that Chinese athletes have been fitted out with kits made by forced labour in Uyghur detentions camps (Beijing denies it), and from sponsors that have remained mute on human rights abuses to the WADA warning athletes to “exercise extreme caution” when eating meat, amid fears it could be contaminated with banned substances.

The new national ski-jumping centre, when last we checked, was a barren landscape of dirty brown hills. At Yanquing, the site of alpine skiing, bobsledding, luge and skeleton, the snow will apparently be man-made, using 49 million gallons of water and 300 snow guns to blanket the competition surface. And whose brilliant idea was it to build the snowboarding venue in the heart of the city’s concrete-clad industrial area, overlooked by a pair of massive former cooling towers from an old steel mill. Some eyesores in a massively polluted city can’t be covered up with bunting, for all the urban landscaping that has just been completed.

And there will be drama. One particularly poignant story line is Kai Owens, from the U.S., in moguls. She was born in China, abandoned as a baby in a town square and sent to an orphanage. Owens isn’t even exactly certain of her age, either 17 or 18. Now she’s returning for the first time as an Olympian.

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At the last Winter Games, in Pyeongchang, five nations — Canada, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.S. — won at least 20 total medals. They’re still among the dominant countries of snow and ice. Gracenote, the global data analytics company, predicts Norway will top the medals table again, with Russia second and Switzerland ahead of the Netherlands in third. Canada is pegged to finish fifth, with 23 medals.

But these Games are about China, honing in on glory, as it did at the Beijing Summer Olympics, pulling out all the training and coaching and culling stops. The efforts were validated by 51 gold medals (48 after some were subsequently lost to doping results) and China finishing second only to the U.S. in the overall medal tally.

What China wants, China gets, if not always for keeps.

While the rest of the world got COVID.

Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno