Sport, politics and Covid collide at the Beijing Winter Olympics

during a pandemic was always going to test the Chinese government, by putting its ever-growing ability to exercise political control and virus containment on a collision course with its enthusiasm for international prestige and status.

Then, high-profile protests dogged the global torch relay, violent suppression of protests in Tibet put Chinese oppression there on the news agenda, there was pressure on leaders to skip the opening ceremony and environmentalists warned about the intense pollution that shrouded Beijing.But, once the competition began, the focus shifted to the athletes. Beijing’s calculation is, no doubt, that the same thing will happen this year.

“Covid has really given them the excuse to completely lock down everything. They want to have complete control over the picture of the Olympics and that helps,” he said. Last year, she vanished from public view after accusing a former senior Communist party official of coercing her into a sexual relationship, and her allegations were scrubbed from the internet.After international outrage, she made a series of stage-managed public appearances inside China, including with Olympic officials, which have done little to assuage concern about whether she is acting with free will.

If an outbreak knocks out high-profile athletes, or significantly diminishes the number of competitors, it could start to undermine the events. A vulnerable population and an unevenly distributed healthcare system makes the potential of a Covid outbreak terrifying. The devastation that ripped through Wuhan in the earliest days of the pandemic could still be unleashed on the rest of China, and fear of this has almost certainly contributed to the intense testing and quarantine rules.These factors have affected how the rest of the world, or at least audiences in markets such as the US, will experience the Games.

There may also be less promotion. In a sign perhaps of how these Olympics are among the most controversial in recent decades, sponsors who pay eye-watering sums to be connected with the Games have not been flaunting those links in the west as they have done in the run-up to previous iterations of the competition.

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