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.