The Beijing Olympics probably start in three weeks. Many athletes don’t think it’s safe

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/01/2022 (1385 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Omicron has been detected in China, and as of this writing over 20 million Chinese citizens had been confined to their homes. Some TV crews that have already landed to broadcast Beijing 2022 have been infected; some athletes have wondered if they should call for a postponement. The Olympics probably begin in a little over three weeks.

So we’re three weeks to a festival of superpower sportswashing, authoritarian pandemic management and a Games that probably shouldn’t be. Human rights groups justifiably howled when China was given the Games. Wednesday, the most high-profile international sports athlete advocate organization, Global Athlete, directly accused the International Olympic Committee of failing to protect athletes.

“It just reinforces the lack of duty of care,” said Rob Koehler, director general of Global Athlete and a former WADA deputy director general. “It’s concerning, and the IOC’s approach has been pretty disappointing, to be quite honest. We went back and forth with (over 300 Olympic) athletes, and at one point we were calling for a postponement. We couldn’t get full agreement from everyone, and we said if we can’t get full agreement we don’t want to ostracize others.

“But some athletes were saying, ‘Can we really be doing this? Are we really going to these Games?’”

Unless China decides Omicron is too big a risk in the next three weeks — and under Omicron’s sped-up timeline, a week is like a month — we are. As Global Athlete notes, athletes will be bunked two to a room, must sign waivers absolving organizers of responsibility for catching COVID, are fuzzy on quarantine details and more.

In a way, China just took the Tokyo 2020 playbook and handed it to the Chinese military, so it is expected to be much more of a clampdown: daily testing for everyone, more enforcing of masking rules, no wandering to the corner store. Some athletes will have a third-shot booster that restores protection vs. infection from Omicron — Canada is right around 100 per cent; some won’t.

Canada had no positive tests on the ground in Tokyo, but does not expect to fully avoid Omicron.

“That would be a great success against Omicron, but I’ve been around long enough to understand that that’s not very likely,” says Dr. Mike Wilkinson, head doctor for the Canadian Olympic Committee. “Success for me would be that Omicron does not take a competing opportunity away from any of our athletes. Yeah, so in other words that we manage it so that they are still able to compete, and hopefully get on the podium.”

The NBA was almost completely boosted and Omicron has still created significant player absences. In Tokyo, the solution was to hustle athletes in and out as close to their event as possible, and if they contracted COVID and took it home that was neither recorded nor the IOC’s problem.

And still there were Canada-fuelled parties in the athletes village, questionable masking in the village, athlete protests over quarantine facilities, tests that never came back, 865 cases and 25 people who went to hospital. That was back when two shots of a vaccine offered better than 90 per cent protection vs. infection from Delta.

But China’s COVID playbook is to exert maximum control, and now they will try to pull off an Olympics with Omicron. China is expected to turn the screws. And athletes dodging their way through a minefield just to get there.

“(Since Dec. 1, with a total of 620 members of the Olympic delegation) we were looking at about 80 positives, but the vast majority of those have all now tested negative and they’ve recovered,” says Wilkinson. “So my concern at the moment is: Are we expecting a wave to start hitting us in the next week or two before we go, which is so close to departure that it’s difficult to prove non-infectiousness?”

The athletes have never felt more like fodder for a television show. China lashes out at every slight, so expecting athletes to speak out against the human rights situation while at the Games is asking a lot. I asked COC CEO David Shoemaker last year what protections or advice the COC would give its athletes while on the ground in Beijing. Shoemaker, who was an NBA executive in China until 2018, mentioned the Hong Kong National Security Law, which criminalizes anti-China speech. He did clarify that under the Olympic agreement athletes are unlikely to be arrested.

Athletes need more power in international sport. In the last few years there has been some progress, including a relaxation of Rule 40, which limited athlete sponsorship promotion, and a lack of iron-fisted use of Rule 50, which forbids political demonstrations of any kind at a Games.

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But China is both a moral and epidemiological mess. The IOC pliantly helped cover up the managed disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai after she accused a high-ranking Chinese government official of sexual assault, and now athletes will gather in China for the biggest athletic festival on Earth. It will be a grim contrast, but telling.

“It’s a party to appease the wealthy and the IOC members, sometimes more than the events that are being put on,” says Koehler. “The lack of flexibility in the competition schedule, which is dictated primarily by broadcasters, athletes being pushed into events or being pulled from events, it’s simply not putting their best interests in play. The IOC has been put on notice because they’re the ones pushing forward. They’re the ones acting like everything is normal.

“And if the IOC believes the wave of athletes activism and athletes speaking up is going to slow down, I think it’s only going to get louder. Because there’s more solidarity and more confident numbers, and more people are exposing what’s going on and why it’s not in the (best) interest for sport, or for athletes.”

The Olympics probably start in three weeks. It’s not clear they should.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur