FNo tickets will be sold to Chinese spectators for the Winter Olympics in Beijing, which begin on February 4. This was announced by the organizing committee on the games website. “Given the serious and complicated situation of the Covid-19 pandemic, and to ensure the safety of all participants and spectators, it has been decided that tickets will no longer be sold but will become part of an adapted program through which groups of spectators will be invited to to be present on site during the games.”
The International Olympic Committee said on request that it welcomes the fact that invited spectators will be present at the competitions. “We respect the final spectator strategy in the interest of safe games for all,” the organization’s press department wrote on Monday evening.
The hosts had already decided at the end of September that no foreign spectators would be allowed to attend the games. The organizers, to whom the IOC referred on this issue, did not provide any further information as to who would be among the invited viewer groups. The participants in the Winter Games, which end on February 20th, and the Paralympics, which are scheduled to take place from March 4th to 13th, are kept strictly away from the Chinese public and are only allowed to move within so-called closed loops from their accommodation to the Olympic sites and back and can only move in the shuttle traffic set up for the games. Fully vaccinated athletes must present two negative PCR test results before departure in their home country and are checked for Covid-19 by PCR tests every day in Beijing. Unvaccinated athletes must go through a 21-day quarantine in Beijing.
Over the weekend, authorities in the host city made public that the omicron variant of the coronavirus had reached the Chinese capital. So far, there has been talk of one positive case in Beijing, which authorities claim is due to contaminated mail from Canada. The mail, quoted the English-language Global Times, was dispatched from Canada on Jan. 7 and reached Beijing on Jan. 11, after being transported through the United States and onward via Hong Kong.
No tickets were already on sale for the summer games in Tokyo, which were postponed to summer 2021; Japanese spectators were only able to watch the track cyclists’ competitions at the Izu Velodrome, 120 kilometers from the Japanese capital.
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