The 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics, now only a month away, are becoming increasingly mired in complaints relating to everything from politics to environmental sustainability
Where are they?
They’re in Beijing, that city having been selected back in 2015 in a two horse race with Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan. Four other candidate cities – Krakow, Oslo, Stockholm and Lviv – withdrew citing the mounting cost of hosting the event. Venues in the Chinese capital will host the opening and closing ceremonies as well as the skating and the ice hockey, while most of the rest of the events will take place in the Yanqing district, home of the National Alpine Ski Centre and 50 miles north of the Chinese capital, or in Hebei Province 140 miles away. This is where much of the skiing and snowboarding events will be held.
And when?
The Games open on February 4, run until February 20 and will feature 3000 participants competing in 109 different events including, for the first time, Big Air, a spectacular ski freestyle event. But due to Covid-19, there will be few if any spectators there to watch it.
What are the complaints?
Take your pick. First up is the much-publicised diplomatic boycott by a range countries including the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. The issue here is China’s human rights record, specifically its treatment of the mostly-Muslim Uyghur population of Xinjiang. The UK’s Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, while serving as Foreign Secretary, referred to China’s “appalling violations of the most basic human rights” while US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has gone further and said the country is committing “genocide and crimes against humanity”. China denies these allegations.
What else?
The area in which the Winter Olympics are being held isn’t known for its prodigious snow cover. Between January and March last year the National Alpine Ski Centre had just two centimetres of the white stuff, less than Paris and Madrid. To counter this, organisers are deploying fake snow made using 200 or so snow cannons and requiring nearly 50 million gallons of water. Fake snow has been used in Winter Olympics before – the first time was at the 1980 event at Lake Place in New York state – and the fake snow melts away just like the real thing, but still questions have inevitably been asked. In Agence France-Presse reports posted on the France 24 website, University of Strasbourg geography professor Carmen de Jong said: “To create events without the primary resource it depends on is not only unsustainable, it’s irresponsible … We could just as well hold the Olympics on the Moon or on Mars”.
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