How different the prospects were in the summer of 2015, less than seven years ago. It was July 31, in Kuala Lumpur, the members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) preferred Beijing to Almaty as the organizer of the 2022 Winter Games and the organizing committee celebrated by announcing “a memorable edition”. It was, then, halfway between the success of the 2008 Olympics and, in fact, the winter ones that would have made the Chinese capital the first city to host both events, moreover in a decidedly short period of time. Beijing today is to all intents and purposes the “city of the two Olympics”, but the prosopopoeia, however legitimate, in the days immediately preceding the opening ceremony (the Games will be held from 4 to 20 February, followed by the Paralympics in the period 4-13 March) leaves room for the inevitable fears generated by the ongoing pandemic situation. Covid-19 was isolated for the first time in China just over two years ago and now, since then, it has been part of everyday life all over the world, let alone in the country where the first outbreak occurred and where also, a few days ago in Beijing, the first case of Omicron variant infection in the capital was isolated.
The propaganda has identified, as a vehicle of contagion, a package from Canada and, although the transmission of the virus in these ways is considered highly unlikely by the scientific community, that was enough to force the government and the organizing committee to review the plans foreseen for the presence of the public in the stands of the Olympic facilities. From the intention to fill the stands for 50% of the capacity, we immediately moved to the most practical solution: closed doors – except for some presences by invitation, and whoever will be there will be able to clap their hands, but not sing – as had happened last summer for the Tokyo Games. This would be enough to make everything less memorable, after all, according to official data, with the high vaccination rate and the absolute low number of current infected, China – which has adopted rather harsh measures to get closer to the situation of Covid zero – theoretically it only has to lose in this sense, especially now that the overall figures (less than 250 new infections per day; very few compared to other parts of the world) have returned to the levels of March 2020, at the time of the lockdown.
About 2,900 athletes will arrive in Beijing, Zhangjiakou and Yanqing – the three cities where the facilities are located – not counting staff and judges, and a bubble has been created for them that will limit their movements only within the area of the competition venues and the Olympic village. Athletes, members of delegations and information operators who will enter China will have to be vaccinated according to the directives of the countries of origin and abide by strict guidelines, just as it was in Tokyo, but probably with greater rigor. A necessary segregation, with the hope of repeating, in terms of contagion limitation, the excellent results of the Japanese Games, although, for various reasons, the epidemiological risk with high temperatures, those typical of summer, is lower than in winter.
It thus becomes impossible to separate the Olympics from the global context, however sport, thanks to its epic component, will also be the protagonist in Beijing, so as to narcotize everyday life with its narration. In the meantime, however, the pandemic has substantially overshadowed the diplomatic aspects which, in recent months, have seen several states announce their intention not to send institutional representatives to the opening ceremony. The allegations of human rights violations and the Uyghur question in Xinjiang have suggested, among others, to the United States and Canada, the United Kingdom and Denmark, Australia and New Zealand, a purely diplomatic boycott which, however, does not affect the presence of athletes. and, in the case of Japan, not even on those, confirmed, of the leaders of the organizing committees of the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. It is no coincidence that Chinese President Xi Jinping, at the recent Davos Forum, invited other nations “to put aside the Cold War mentality and seek peaceful coexistence and solutions capable of bringing benefits to all”: he did so in anticipation of the China’s intention to make one billion doses of vaccines available to other countries, but the coincidence with the Olympic diplomatic boycott did not go unnoticed. Moreover, in recent months, diplomatic criticism has been joined by the interruption of relations between China and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) after the case involving tennis player Peng Shuai, who previously, through the Weibo social network, had accused of violence, former Deputy Prime Minister Zhang Gaoli, then – after a couple of weeks in which no news of him had been heard – had in fact retracted, in a not entirely convincing way, claiming to have been misunderstood. A sufficiently embarrassing story, which had led to the cancellation of WTA tournaments in China and had even involved the president of the IOC, Thomas Bach, who had only needed a video call to bring the story back on the tracks of a normality that can only be such for a regime . This is the same IOC who preferred to remain neutral on the issue of diplomatic boycotts, unable to disavow their choices or annoy a regime which, after all, has spared no effort to organize an event that, in recent times, for issues of costs is no longer considered an opportunity, but rather a risk, by several countries.
In this sense, the temporal proximity to the 2008 Summer Olympics has certainly allowed Beijing to increase sustainability in economic terms, exploiting, adapting and reusing structures built to this so. The most striking case concerns the so-called Water Cube, the aquatic center that hosted the swimming events at the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. The system – designed for an environment with a high internal temperature and very high humidity – will also be used this time, but, unlike its original intended use (and future, because once the Games are over it will return to being a swimming pool) , now it is in fact an ice palace for which sophisticated technologies have been used in order to define and maintain a very different ecosystem. The Water Cube has thus become Ice Cube and will host the curling competitions, thus perfectly symbolizing what, in the IOC propaganda, represents the concept of legacy, and the same can be said of the National Indoor Stadium, the Capital Indoor Stadium and the Wukesong Sports Center, which have also been temporarily converted to ice rinks. The only facility built from scratch in the capital is the National Speed Skating Oval, which stands today where in 2008, archery and field hockey tournaments were held on outdoor courts.
Beijing 2022 aims to prove to be an international business card in terms of sustainability, still at the beginning of the fourteenth five-year plan, but at the moment it is the fear of bringing the virus back home to take the securities abroad, and it will be so until the medals will not begin to change the subject of the narrative.
