Beijing and the IOC have created a messy Olympics so far — in more ways than one

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This article was published 06/02/2022 (1359 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEIJING No Olympic plan survives first contact intact. The Games are just hideously complicated: a multi-layered, multi-site, multi-part ecosystem, a thousand Rube Goldberg machines intersecting at once with human error thrown in for good measure, for weeks on end. Add a pandemic and everything gets harder.

Still, when the International Olympic Committee awarded 2022 to Beijing, even after China’s poor human rights record in 2008 had continued to deteriorate, they must have known this would not be a morally defensible Games. And it’s not.

But the IOC must have also counted on Beijing to deliver a drum-tight marvel of logistics, and it turns out that isn’t happening either, so far.

“A lot of improvements have been made,” said IOC sports director Christophe Dubi, in response to a blistering criticism from the German Olympic committee regarding the state of athlete quarantines. “But most of us, we have found ourselves once in a situation where we’re not necessarily meeting the conditions that we expected. It has been addressed.”

“We of course pay very close attention to these issues, and will respond quickly and effectively and address all these problems,” said Beijing organizing committee spokesperson Han Zirong.

They both could have been referring to problems big and small. The Beijing Games are complicated by COVID, and may actually keep it under control: new cases went from 45 Saturday to 10 Sunday, as fewer planes are landing. Getting athletes through safely, without driving infections elsewhere, was clearly job one.

And even as the “test, trace, isolate, masks and vaccines” system works, it is riddled with absurdities.

At the figure skating venue the main rink and practice rink are right next to one another, a stone’s throw even with a weak arm, and media must take a shuttle between them because nobody can walk anywhere, ever. The bigger problem is the buses, which are the lifeblood of any Games: schedules shift, buses wend through complex routes even in the controlled loop, nobody knows how long anything takes, and the trips to the two mountain zones have produced tales of abandonment and absurdity; the word Kafka gets thrown around, if you ask. And this is before you get to the part where it is tricky to find, uh, food.

None of this, to be clear, is a complaint. Every journalist expects inconveniences, and we knew what we were getting into, and trying to navigate the difficulties is part of the challenge. Now, some things go beyond acceptable: Dutch reporter Sjoed den Daas was dragged off-screen while on camera by Chinese security officials before being released while reporting on the opening ceremony. The IOC said it had reached out to his TV station; his television station denied they had, though that was apparently later rectified.

But China had total control over these Games and what it is delivering is a study in ham-handed control, combined with a sort of incompetence, which is not on brand with how China wants to be seen. The German committee went public with blistering complaints over athlete quarantines, where basic amenities like on-demand meals or training equipment were insufficient. Dirk Schimmelpfennig, the head of the organization, called it “an organizational problem.” The IOC is encouraging some national committees to register formal complaints, because it gives the IOC more leverage in trying to negotiate with Beijing organizers. The IOC is trying to mend the system in real time, because it has an interest in not turning these already objectionable Games into a live-action prison riot.

Which means the IOC is selling its soul for a Games that may not work in the ways it could.

The IOC has been defending its approval of a Uyghur athlete in the torch-lighting in the opening ceremony for two days now. China has been systematically trying to erase and re-educate the minority Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang, which has shameful echoes in Canada. Using a Uyghur athlete in the apex of a faux-show of unity and a ceremony of peace, approved by the IOC, was pure brute politics and the IOC approved.

“Just to make clear to you, she’s an Olympian competing here … and as you’ll know from the Olympic Charter we don’t discriminate against people, where they’re from, what their background is,” said IOC spokesperson Mark Adams. “And so I think she is absolutely perfectly entitled to be taking part in the torch relay.

“I think it was a lovely concept.”

A lovely concept. Defending something that has been described as genocide on the basis of equality is something that should stick with the IOC for a long time.

So should Peng Shuai. The disappeared tennis star is said to be within the Olympic bubble, and the IOC continues to say IOC president Thomas Bach will meet with her. They won’t say when, or how, and it seems it will be impossible to be anything but cover for China’s treatment of Peng after she accused a high-ranking Olympic and former government official of sexual assault.

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“We also want to respect her right to what she wants to say, and when she says it,” Adams said. “For the time being, that’s all I can tell you.”

It’s messy. There are polls in Canada showing half of Canadians won’t watch these Games; there are polls in the United States that show similar numbers. Both are rooted in the moral discomfort over China as the host. On Sunday, the IOC spent time comforting itself with Chinese TV numbers — which don’t come with the same five-star hotel underwriting rights fees — and the state-supplied number of how many Chinese people participate in winter sports: 327 million, they keep saying. It is never quite defined.

The IOC is clearly and regularly kowtowing to the regime here, while trying to fix the Games in the only ways they can, and maybe they can do that. A series of Western democracies awaits, though the status of the United States as part of that club is pending, and soon the IOC can comfort itself in Paris, in Milan, in Los Angeles, in Brisbane and maybe in Vancouver.

But here the IOC owns everything in this morally broken Games, now and come what may. And that’s the part that can’t be fixed.

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