There are a lot of outstanding questions about exactly how the 2022 Beijing Olympics might look and, to be frank, there is still a lot that’s unknown – largely because the organizers haven’t made or announced their final decisions. But things are starting to take shape and – despite the uncertainty that COVID-19 clearly brings – there is a fair amount we can be confident about.
Will China open up its borders before the Olympics?
I was going to write “almost certainly not”, but I think it’s clear the answer to this is a resounding “No”. China has managed the pandemic to zero right from the beginning and, while there have been inklings of a discussion about a change in strategy in recent weeks, don’t expect China to change course until after the Olympics – and quite possibly further beyond that. There is absolutely no way that China will allow overseas spectators in for the purpose of watching the Olympics. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Tokyo lowered the bar in this regard, and there is no incentive whatsoever for Beijing to change this.
Will there be spectators at the 2022 Olympics?
This is probably the greatest unknown at this point. I can foresee several scenarios:
- No spectators. This would be a huge shame but understandable given the precedence set by Tokyo, plus China’s aversion to risk. The country’s biggest fear is that tens of thousands of overseas visitors bring in the virus, which then gets out into the general population, sparking the country’s first mass nationwide outbreak. Decisions will be made with this issue top of mind.
- Spectators allowed at outdoor (snow) events, but not at indoor (ice) events. The current plan appears to be to keep all different parties (athletes, coaches, officials, media and (possibly) spectators) separate from each other in some sort of elaborate Beijing Olympic bubble. If so, it would be easier to do this at the outdoor events, where fans are further from the action and the risk of transmission from athletes to spectators is lower.
- Spectators in an Olympic bubble. This being China, I could see a group of several thousand spectators transported from one event to another all over the greater Beijing area throughout the Games, after which they would then have to quarantine afterwards before being allowed to reintegrate into society. Spectators were brought in to fill empty seats in 2008, so I don’t see why some sort of similar arrangement wouldn’t be considered for 2022. Would this be limited to Chinese nationals? There are a few signs that it might be, but that’s a longer discussion for another time.
- All spectators under normal conditions. While BOCOG, the organizing committee, has been tasked with putting on a great show, the messaging has long since been changed to an Olympics that is “safe and simple”. While I truly believe BOCOG would want to have spectators, all things being equal, their priorities come fairly well down the overall list of priorities for China. So I just don’t see this option happening. There is too great a risk, from China’s perspective, of spectators getting infected by pesky COVID-carrying foreign athletes, and then the virus spreading domestically.
There could, of course, be some other scenarios I’m missing here. Feel free to leave some suggestions in the comments below and I’ll pass them onto BOCOG 😉
How can I buy tickets?
Usually tickets go on sale around the world years in advance, but this is not a usual Olympics. Should tickets be available for general purchase (see above), an announcement will be made later in the year, according to the official site, which may be around November (at a guess).
Will the athletes have to quarantine?
I’ve seen perhaps the most misleading stories and headlines written about this topic, so let me be clear: the athletes themselves will not have to quarantine. “But why would China let the athletes in without quarantine?”, I hear at least half of you cry. Quite simply, it’s not China decision.
Would China prefer to have the athletes quarantine? OF COURSE! But when you agree to host an Olympics, you effectively sign away your powers to the IOC, and a mini nation-state moves in temporarily. I’m exaggerating (slightly), but the IOC has told China that athletes cannot be forced to quarantine.
But China! But COVID! It doesn’t matter. Let’s play this out a little…
Imagine if the foreign athletes were cooped up in a single room for 14 or 21 days beforehand ahead of their events, while their Chinese rivals were putting in some final practice. The competitive advantage would be farcical. Imagine, too, the costs involved. Professional athletes like NHL players, who have fought tooth and nail to pause their season for three weeks (more on that below), only have three weeks to spare, not an additional three weeks for quarantine.
Many of the other athletes are amateurs who have sacrificed everything (money, time, career etc) just to be at the Olympics in the first place, and have to take time off their “real” jobs. They couldn’t handle an additional three weeks of disruption. Many simply wouldn’t come at all and the Olympics would be rendered a joke. Additionally, while China’s COVID strategy works for China, much of the rest of the world increasingly sees it as unnecessarily restrictive and there would be few winter sports nations siding with China on this.
There are still plenty of other unknowns. Will the athletes have to be vaccinated? Probably not (freedoms), but the IOC will strongly encourage them to be vaccinated, as they did for Tokyo. Regular testing at the Games will also put the onus on the athletes to protect themselves, since if they test positive, they will be kicked out and their dreams will be ruined. But, again, they won’t have to quarantine, so don’t believe that if you read it elsewhere.
I will add one caveat – and this is not me hedging my bets here – but if there is another curveball between now and February, such as a new virus variant substantially more scary than Delta, then all bets are off. In that case, we could expect to see the Olympics either cancelled or pushed back a year.
So then how will the Olympics work logistically?
At each Winter Olympics, there are slightly under 3,000 athletes attending, and with the number of events rising from 102 in 2018 to 109 in 2022, there could be a little over 3,000 this time around. But even with no overseas spectators, there will still be tens of thousands of people coming into the country in total, even as the IOC seeks to restrict the numbers of accredited coaches, trainers, officials, judges and media personnel.
As mentioned above, it sounds like the current plan is to keep all those groups apart from each other as much as possible through a series of tightly regulated bubbles. Of course, while the athletes (and presumably some coaches, too) won’t have to quarantine, many of the other groups will have to, so there is less risk involved there, even though it’s still a massive operation for Beijing.
Given that there are three separate Olympic clusters – Beijing, Yanqing and Zhangjiakou – there will likely be some sort of super bubble for each one. Athletes would fly in and be transported to their relevant bubble and wouldn’t leave – except for the Opening Ceremony – until their events were over. So if you’re the head of a particular National Olympic Committee, for example, and you want to see your country’s athletes at various sites, well you’re probably out of luck. It’s this factor that makes the notion of spectators reasonably unlikely: bubbles keep people inside them safe, but they also keep others out.
How would you reasonably allow spectators inside the bubbles or at least close enough to the sporting action to make it worthwhile? Tokyo tried something along those lines in terms of local residents coming in and out of the bubble and the resulting COVID case count was absolutely unacceptable by Chinese levels. This New York Times piece makes it sound like the Beijing Olympics will be something out of the movie Outbreak. That’s perhaps something of an exaggeration, but don’t expect much of a party next February either.
What about the rescheduled test events?
Every Olympic Games has a full series of official test events ahead of time, but most of the ones for Beijing were cancelled last year. Some were held at the start of this year, with largely domestic participants, with the rest rescheduled through October-December this year. Quarantine requirements will likely mean that the vast majority of international athletes choose to stay away. Ice rinks and curling sheets are pretty much the same the world over, so this won’t pose a huge problem, even if it means audiences in China are, once again, left with purely domestic competitions to watch.
An alternative solution would be to attempt a dry-run of the Beijing Olympic bubble ahead of time and allow foreign athletes in and out for the competitions – after all, test events are supposed to accurately recreate Olympic conditions. But China has shown no signs so far that it will do this, and will likely see that as too much of a risk. Those running these events will be under no illusion that mistakes cannot ahead of the Olympics, so why take that risk? Again, it just doesn’t make any sense when viewed from a Chinese perspective.
The one exception to this will be the sliding sports – bobsleigh, skeleton and luge – which have also been allocated training periods ahead of the test events in October (bobsleigh and skeleton) and November (luge). Any serious competitors – in fact any competitors at all – will want to come into China for the 2-3 week training periods (after completing their quarantine, of course) to learn the track, which is a newly built one in Yanqing.
I was in Vancouver covering the 2010 Olympics when Georgian luger died Nodar Kumaritashvili after crashing on the sliding track during a training run just hours before the Opening Ceremony and it put a huge dampener on the whole Games. These athletes can reach speeds of 90 miles per hour and the risks are real, so there is no option but to allow international athletes to train on the Yanqing track ahead of time.
Are the NHL players going to come?
I’ve covered this extensively here on the site, with a detailed look at what the presence of NHL players could mean to Team China (summary: not good), the decisions the NHL has been wrestling with internally, and fears that the NHL players may not get their wish after all.
News came this week that the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) has pledged to cover COVID-19 insurance for the NHL players at the final round of Olympic qualifiers this month, which suggests they will do the same at the actual Olympics. Medical insurance news isn’t exactly sexy, but this was one of the biggest obstacles stopping NHL players from coming to Beijing, so this is undoubtedly good news. This recent opinion piece from the Toronto Star bashes NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman for all he’s done to harm the international game over the years, but I’m now a little more hopeful that he will soon confirm that NHL players will indeed come to Beijing. That news could come as early as next week, but the “final deadline” has been extended multiple times already so the timing on a final decision is anyone’s guess at this point.
Chinese men’s ice hockey team takes shape
Here’s a look at the new incarnation of Team China, which, on first viewing, may not quite strike you as a typical Chinese national team. While the current status of these players’ citizenship is unknown, few, if any, actually had Chinese passports this time last year, but all will be fully accredited in time for the Olympics next year, thanks to China’s naturalization policy which identified and recruited “heritage” players i.e. international players of Chinese descent. The players will represent Kunlun Red Star (KRS) in Russia’s KHL this season – playing out of Russia all year due to travel restrictions – before returning to China in time for the Olympics.
While the above collection of players is still far below the level needed to compete at the Olympic level and they only have five months left to gel cohesively, it’s still a massive improvement on the previous Olympic squad of Chinese youngsters, 10 of whom have now joined the new squad in Russia. You can check out the official KRS roster here. The team is currently playing preseason games and will kick off their regular season in Nizhnekamsk, a city 1,000 km east of Moscow, on September 2.
Finally, I went on WPIC’s The Negotiation podcast this week to discuss the legacy of the 2008 Olympic Games, China’s performance at Tokyo 2020, expectations for Beijing 2022 and more. You can listen to the episode here.
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