Opinion: China shouldn't be hosting the Olympics. But there's a reason I want them to be a success.
BEIJING – There are many reasons to despise the 2022 Winter Olympics. Let’s start with the obvious: they shouldn’t be here.
It will be an eternal stain on the already-dubious reputation of the International Olympic Committee that it gave the awful, repressive Chinese regime the opportunity to host its second Games in 14 years. The human rights abuses of the nation where I sit writing this column are reprehensible. My colleagues and I will report and talk about that every single day of these Games.
But the fact is, the Olympics are here, and they begin with Friday’s opening ceremony. No matter what we think, wish or hope for, these Games will go on, and they will go on in China, just as they did when Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008.
That said, there are reasons not to hate them. There are reasons to plan to watch them. There are reasons to hope they are successful.
Why? Not for China’s leaders – no, never for them – but for the athletes. For most of them, this will be their one and only chance to compete at an Olympic Games. It’s not their fault that the Olympics are here. They had absolutely nothing to do with that decision. This is the stage the IOC has given them for the grandest moment of their careers, and in most cases, their young lives.
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Some athletes have said in private conversations that they wish they didn’t have to be here. Others have spoken out against China’s government. But they’re all here, and they will celebrate victory and lament defeat just as those who came before them did in Vancouver in 2010, Sochi in 2014 and Pyeongchang in 2018. It’s what Olympians do, wherever they gather.
There also is something significant to be celebrated by simply putting on an Olympic Games in the midst of our global pandemic. Tokyo pulled it off for the Summer Games six months ago, though it was a strain every step of the way. How sad it was that Tokyo, a true Olympic behemoth of a city, could not put on the Games it would have hosted in a different time.
And so it is for Beijing, a foreboding, fenced-off COVID-19 fortress. When I saw two people in white Hazmat suits waiting in the jet bridge to greet my flight from Tokyo to Beijing early Tuesday morning, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of sadness that it had come to this.
There were dozens more Olympic workers dressed exactly like them throughout the airport in those early morning hours, testing everyone for COVID, gathering luggage, organizing buses to hotels. It felt as if we had walked onto a dystopian movie set.
All those people in their bulky suits, with even their cell phones stowed safely in plastic bags out of fear of contamination, were there until 2 a.m. simply to help dozens of North American journalists and dozens more U.S. athletes get ready to do their jobs. They were there for us.
Those workers’ care and respect for the Olympians and those of us who will be around them for the next three weeks is admirable. While some people in other nations refuse to do something as simple as wear a mask, the Chinese airport crew donned head-to-toe protective gear to ensure not only their own safety, but the safety of their international guests.
Say what you will about China – and we certainly will – those after-midnight workers symbolized something worthwhile about what is to come. An Olympian effort, we might say.