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China: Xi promises ‘splendid’ Winter Olympics amid Covid, diplomatic boycott
China will deliver a “streamlined, safe and splendid” Winter Olympics, President Xi Jinping said with the Games set to begin on Friday.
China will deliver a “streamlined, safe and splendid” Winter Olympics, President Xi Jinping said on Thursday with the Games set to begin on Friday amid a rising number of Covid-19 cases among athletes and staff and diplomatic boycott by several western countries.
It’s not the diplomatic boycott alone that’s injected a dose of international politics to the Games.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s arrival on Friday for the opening ceremony - along with several other heads of states from authoritarian countries - amid the crisis in Ukraine is being seen as a joint show of strength by Beijing and Moscow.
The presence of a Chinese soldier wounded in a border clash with India at Galwan Valley on June 15, 2020, in the Olympics torch relay was widely covered in Chinese media, adding to the Chinese narrative on the ongoing border tension.
On Thursday, addressing the International Olympic Committee (IOC) session in the capital via a brief video message, Xi said China had played an active part in the Olympic movement since staging the 2008 summer Olympics.
Xi said “China is ready” to host an event that lives up to the Olympic slogan, “faster, higher, stronger - together”.
“We will do our best to deliver to the world a streamlined, safe and splendid Games,” he said.
For these winter Games, the country had engaged 300 million Chinese in winter sports as promised, he said. “From ‘One World-One Dream’ in 2008 to ‘Together for a Shared Future’ in 2022, China has taken an active part in the Olympic movement and consistently championed the Olympic spirit,” he said.
IOC president Thomas Bach, who has repeatedly defended his organisation’s choice for the 2022 Olympics despite criticism from western countries and rights groups on China’s human rights record, saying the IOC was not a political body nor was its mandate to influence laws in sovereign states.
He said on Thursday that in the two years leading up to the Beijing Games he had seen “the dark clouds of the growing politicisation of sport on the horizon”.
“We also saw that in some peoples’ minds the boycott ghosts of the past were rearing their ugly heads again,” Bach said.
“Today we can say China is a winter sports country. This is why Beijing 2022 will be the start of a new era for global winter sport,” Bach said.
He estimated China’s winter sports industry to be worth some $150 billion by 2025.
Meanwhile, a total of 55 new Covid-19 infections were found among Olympic Games-related personnel on February 2, the chair of the Beijing 2022 medical expert panel said on Thursday, the highest daily tally so far.
At least 29 cases were found among new airport arrivals, Brian McCloskey told the IOC session while 26 were among those in the “closed loop” bubble that separates all event personnel from the public.
Since January 23, there have been 287 positive tests among Games-related personnel from a total of 610,000 tests, according to an Associated Press report. “The numbers are very small,” McCloskey said. “We are confident that the system will work. But we are not relaxed. We keep all measures in place,” McCloskey said.
