In this week’s Olympic round-up:
China’s vaccine diplomacy took a twist this week with news emerging after this week’s virtual IOC Session that China has offered its vaccines to all participants of the next two Olympics – this summer in Tokyo and next February in Beijing. Well, “offered” is perhaps a touch generous, since IOC President Thomas Bach says the IOC will cover the costs. But already there has been some opposition…
With 51 weeks to go until the 2022 Olympic Winter Games in Beijing, we’re on the eve of the Lunar New Year here in China, which means we’re about to enter the Year of the Ox, but – perhaps more importantly – we are leaving the Year of the Rat behind. That’s because Rat years are often associated with disaster and bad luck – with the massive Sichuan earthquake in 2008 and COVID-19 being the two most obvious examples from the past two Rat years.
While Beijing has been marking the one-year countdown (see more below and last week’s recap), given that there’s been little sporting action to discuss, talk of a boycott has been gathering pace overseas. I’m not going to offer any thoughts on whether or not a boycott should happen – there are plenty of far more qualified people on both sides of the equation already doing that – but my own analysis of the evidence today is that a Beijing Olympics boycott won’t happen.
Quite simply, the Europeans, which includes a sizable number of major winter sports nations, don’t seem to be interested in a boycott, and, while opinion of China in the US – both among the public and government – appears to be at, or near, an historic low, a solo boycott could easily backfire on Washington and come across as a toothless protest from a petulant nation. Canada could conceivably join, though the situation there is complicated by the respective detentions of Meng Wanzhou and the two Michaels, but there seems to be more excitement there about the prospective return of NHL players to the Olympics (see more below) than there is talk of a Beijing Olympics boycott.
Continue reading 51 Weeks To Go: Boycotts & Hockey FightsContinue reading Why you should take headlines from China with a sack of salt
上周，国际上的一系列报道隐隐暗示现在没有国家愿意举办2022冬奥会了。无巧不成书，当有一家媒体表达出这样的观点时，大家都会人云亦云。
国际奥委会于上周与美国电视台NBC以77.5亿美元的天价续约，从而使NBC持有的奥运会转播权延续到了2032年，这个决定对于体育产业而言堪称一场冲击。
Japan is having a very, very good time on the Olympic stage right now. Firstly, Tokyo won the right to host the 2020 Olympics. They had always been the favorite, but had to allay growing fears that Fukushima’s ongoing nuclear nightmare would not have any long-lasting effects for the country (though, in truth, they may have been helped more by a combination of Spain’s dreadful employment record and Turkey’s heavy-handed government). It also means Asia will host back-to-back Olympic Games, following Pyeongchang in 2018.
Secondly, wrestling has been reinstated into the Olympic schedule. Much has changed since February when wrestling looked set to lose out, but Japan will benefit hugely from this. Not only do they sit fourth in the all-time medal table for Olympic wrestling (third if you take out the now-defunct Soviet team), but they won four gold medals in London last year, a total matched only by Russia.
