Winter Is Coming
The game of thrones of sports changes from kingdom. But it does not move from Asia. Actually, it only moves 3,000 kilometers to the west. Of the friendly and democratic Japan, to the totalitarian Chinese. The strangest Olympic Games ever celebrated have come to an end. Next stop, before Paris 2024, it's time to take the witness to Beijing with its winter games in February 2022.
Beijing wants to do what Tokyo did not achieve: celebrate the first great party of the post pandemic era. That translates with a sports show full of public and without motion restrictions. Just the opposite of what Tokyo 2020 has been.
China wants a few games in the old normality. At least, something that looks like a lot. Because the Asian giant carries with its borders closed to foreigners since March of last year. And you do not plan to open them next February.
Surely, if the new outbreaks that are now hitting the country give a respite, there will only be local public in the stands. They will all be Chinese, but they will be many. That he has full capacity and that he looks good on television, the organization will be responsible.
What is not yet clear is whether athletes, members of the federations and the Olympic Committees of each participating country, will have to keep some kind of quarantine when entering China. Right now, to enter the Asian country, you have to spend four weeks of enclosure in a hotel room. They are reduced to three if the traveler has a house in China, since the last week of confinement could do it at home.
This strict requirement is now fulfilling all national and foreigners who enter the Asian country. It does not matter if an ambassador arrives, a Head of State or WHO researchers to decipher the origin of the pandemic. There are no exceptions in the second world power, which maintains its policy of Covid zero.
Less than six months left for February 4 Beijing 2022 open its doors. "All the facilities are already almost ready," said the organizers in a recent communiqué.
As detailed by the EFE agency after a view on the facilities, 3,000 athletes will compete in 109 modalities, seven of them new. There will be 12 ice and snow venues, spread through Beijing and the neighboring mountains of Hebei, for skating, skiing or snowboarding.
Several Chinese officials have been in Tokyo Games to monitor the effectiveness of security measures during the pandemic. This time, as Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, is expected, there is no delays in the celebration of February competitions, regardless of the evolution of the pandemic.
But in Beijing, not only worries that there is a rebound of contagions by the Delta variant before their games. Around the event, a chorus is around for months, asking for boycott. He has a lot to see that China is a regime without freedom of expression that constantly violates human rights.
In June, there were protests at the same time in 50 cities around the world. They used the hashtag # Nobeijing2022 to order the boycott. Representatives of Tibet, of the Muslim minority Uigur, Hong Kong, Taiwan and southern Mongolia tried to press with demonstrations outside China to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to change the headquarters of winter games.
The pressure that human rights agencies about the IOC, athletes, sponsors and sports federations are also doing, is increasing. Human and nations groups such as the United States, Great Britain and Germany have accused China of crimes against the Uigurian minority, even qualifying Beijing's repression as genocide.
"If the games continue, Beijing gets the International Approval Seal for what they are doing," says Lhaladon Tethong of the Tibet Institute of Action.
"Is it okay to organize an international sporting event of goodwill as the Olympic Games while the host nation commits a genocide just beyond the stands?", He asks Tethong, who claims to have met with IOC members, an institution that repeats a And again that is "neutral" and that always remains the "margin of politics".
Although the defense of human rights by the Agency is enshrined in its statutes within the Olympic Charter.
Date Of Update: 09 August 2021, 12:46
