“Some might crack”: between Omicron and boycott, the Beijing Games under pressure

The electric shuttles spin at full speed on Beijing’s fourth ring road, along reserved lines, marked with the five rings. Between the airport and the three Olympic sites, nothing must stop the convoys escorted by police cars. A sign of the climate of health hypervigilance, the mayor of Beijing called on residents to “not approach buses, even in the event of an accident”.

If the Chinese government fears that the arrival of thousands of athletes, coaching staff and journalists will lead to a local resumption of the epidemic, it is not the only one to be under pressure. Athletes will live with the constant anxiety of catching the Covid during the competition (from February 4 to 20). The French delegation tried to anticipate the problem. “At the Tokyo Olympics, we only set up a psychological support cell by telephone, but here we have two psychologists on site, because some could crack, explains Dr Philippe Le Van, chief doctor of the French National Olympic and Sports Committee, from Beijing. When you prepare for four years and you are eliminated, not because of your performance, but of a virus, it’s hard.”

Positive cases in isolation for 10 days

Despite compulsory screening before departure and vaccination, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had identified, at the end of January, more than a hundred people who tested positive on their arrival in the health bubble – an area completely cut off from the rest of the country, surrounded by wide barriers, sometimes topped with barbed wire. Among them, a few athletes, including the Norwegian Olympic skiathlon champion, Simen Hegstad Krueger, who will not be able to defend his title.

Fearing a hemorrhage among the participants, the IOC put pressure on Beijing to lower the sensitivity of the tests, bringing the threshold of viral presence triggering a positive result to a level closer to European standards. As a result, people just recovering from coronavirus are now less likely to test positive.

Every day before 6 p.m., the athletes and their companions will however have to be screened by individuals in cosmonaut attire. Positive cases will be placed in solitary confinement for ten days and will only be able to return to the bubble after showing a negative test three days in a row. Suffice to say that the competition will be over for them … But the contact cases could also miss the tests: they will have to stay in their room for a week, then display several negative tests at twenty-four hour intervals to get out.

Extreme sanitary measures

China is adopting even stricter measures than in Tokyo, “because it considers its zero-Covid strategy to be more effective than the approach adopted by Western nations”, Chinese diplomacy spokesman Zhao boldly declared. Lijian. Under the threat of Omicron, the communist regime will try to prove the superiority of its radical method, which it is the last in the world to apply, whatever the economic and social consequences – at the least positive case, of the cities or entire neighborhoods are confined.

Deeming the health measures extreme, the American embassy in Beijing asked Washington to allow diplomats and their families to leave China. The provocation too much, in the eyes of the Chinese authorities, who urged Washington to “stop disrupting” their Games. The communist regime is embittered by the diplomatic boycott announced by the United States and several of its allies (such as Australia, Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, Japan and the Netherlands) to protest against the violations human rights in this country.

For fear that the event will turn into a platform, the Chinese authorities have warned athletes who dare to criticize the regime: any violation of Chinese laws will be punished. Those who might be tempted to wear t-shirts asking where tennis player Peng Shuai went – she disappeared after accusing a senior Chinese leader of sexual assault – are warned. In this respect, the absence of an audience is a boon for the regime: no possible incident in the stands.

Mistrust regarding the application of the Games

Certainly, the denunciations of the repression of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, which should surge from abroad, are not likely to improve China’s image. “But, even if the regime is doing everything to dissuade the West from using human rights to undermine the event, it is used to having to defend itself on this subject since the Beijing Olympics in 2008. And above all, China now has more influence and can use it against organizations and countries that challenge it,” said Zhao Tong, a researcher at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center in Beijing.

Some nevertheless suspect the organizing country of wanting to spy on the participants. Everyone must download the MY2022 application to their phone – used in particular for health monitoring of the event – ​​which, according to researchers from the Canadian firm Citizen Lab, has security flaws. Several countries advised their delegations not to carry their personal means of communication. “Recommendations on our personal data have indeed been made, underlines Philippe Le Van. We exchange between us via telephones rented for the occasion, to preserve sensitive data.”

China, which has promised to make the countries that boycotted it “pay the price”, will on the other hand be able to count on the presence of some twenty Heads of State, most of them authoritarian, with, in guest star, the Russian leader Vladimir Putin, whom Xi Jinping has approached in recent years, but also the Egyptian Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi or the Saudi Mohammed bin Salman. This will be the Chinese president’s first face-to-face meeting with foreign leaders in two years! And the way to prove to its people that China is not isolated on the international scene.