Winter Olympics - the non-sporty side

[nineveh_uk]

The Winter Olympics kicked off officially yesterday with a very low-key opening ceremony that was presumably the only way they could avoid any references to the pandemic whatsoever, except for their being no audience. It did rather make me wonder what the point of having Zhang Yimou direct it was.So the Olympics are in Beijing, which technically makes it the first city to host both the summer and winter games, though given the distances to the mountain venues that honour might as well go to Munich for the 1936 Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. All the reasons that Beijing was a terrible choice I listed in this post still apply, likewise this article. Except now we're in the aforementioned global pandemic and most important of all, human rights abuses are even worse than what was known in 2015, with the Xinjiang internment camps and other aspects of the Uyghur genocide. As some article I read said, if you can't draw the line of mentioning politics when it comes to sport at genocide, where are you going to? And the pandemic is actually really helpful for the Chinese authorities, no wonder neither they nor the IOC didn't want to postpone, it's a convenient way to avoid issues like journalists asking questions or competitors or tourists talking to anyone who hasn't been carefully vetted.

Given all this it is hardly surprising that even winter sports fans are finding it hard to summon the usual enthusiasm. I'm watching anyway. A personal boycott would achieve precisely nothing, writing to the sponsors and the British Olympic Committee won't either, but I shall do it anyway. And give some money in better directions. On the evidence of the first couple of days, what's in store is some very good sport, bizarre visuals of skiing in a desert, and pretty much zero atmosphere. Though that was likely to be the case even without the pandemic for a lot of events. I shall enjoy a lot of the sport, but damn it, we could have had Oslo. Though Oslo is probably incredibly relieved we aren't having Oslo.

Comments

[violsva]

Yes, I suppose the bright side to having the Pandemic Olympics in Beijing is that at least they aren't anywhere else.

[nineveh_uk]

Yeah, I don't imagine second-place Kazakhstan would have postponed them either, and it seems unlikely they would have improved the poor human rights record.