Games credibility skating on thin ice after Chinese dish up debacle
Australia’s athletes have done themselves proud but the hosts of this major sporting event can’t say the same
FOR Norway’s four-time nordic combined skiing world champion Jarl Magnus Riiber, the Beijing Olympics started in a bad way and then took a turn for the worse. He spent 14 days locked up in “corona prison”, the dire isolation rooms inflicted upon Olympic participants who test positive to Covid-19. Then, released just in time to compete in the Nordic combined, Riiber went the wrong way on the unfamiliar track because he had not been able to train, and lost his gold medal position.
Riiber’s frustrating Olympic experience is everything that these Olympics represent: a disaster born of Olympic officials acquiescing to the most unpalatable of regimes. First caving in to China, desperate not to have Covid ravage its population — which may question the effectiveness of its homegrown vaccine — and then appeasing warmongering Russia and allowing a drug-tainted skater to continue in the Olympic competition.
Many aspects of this hugely repressive Games are not shown to Australian television audiences. Host broadcaster Seven has been the biggest cheerleader of the Olympic competition, and in-depth scrutiny of off-field plays has been missing in action.
The pictures look pretty, especially so when Australians win medals – and the gold medal of Jakara Anthony in the moguls, the silvers of halfpipe titan Scotty James and an ecstatic luger Jackie Narracott, and the bronze by high-flying snowboard slopestyler Tess Coady have produced Australia’s most successful Winter Olympic Games in history. Once again, the Australian winter sports team, with minimal cash support compared to spending on summer sports, has delivered huge bang for small bucks.
Host broadcasters have reported a trend that viewing figures on terrestrial television are down, but that streaming of various sports on devices has skyrocketed. Global advertisers swerved these Games for political reasons, but the big brands still see value in supporting future editions of the Games – a critical point for Brisbane 2032.
However, the dire conditions under which everyone was locked up in China in a closed loop, behind high wire, closed roads and thousands of security staff have many passing a verdict of “worst Olympics since Munich 1972’’.
Just one small example. More than 10 Australian officials spent an entire night without sleep to ensure Katie Parker could race in the slalom after her positive Covid test upon arrival in Beijing. Urgent test results clearing her were processed at 4am and then she was woken at 5.30am, getting to the start line with just minutes to spare.
“Everything was ready for her on the off chance she could race. All her gear was laid out and I had a car ready to drive her to the course,’’ coach Mick Branch said.
Parker had gone to bed distressed that her Olympic dream had been destroyed. She woke after the medical team had fast-tracked the new lab results and had the paperwork already filed, so no time was wasted.
Branch, like all the other Olympic officials and participants, has had around 20 PCR tests in the past fortnight. Some “close contacts” of a Covid positive have notched up closer to 40. Australia has been also doing its own medical testing with a portable pathology lab to circumvent problems.
Our curlers’ uncertainty — when Tahlia Gill was positive, negative, negative, negative, negative, positive, negative — was just another snapshot of the shambles and upheaval other nations, particularly Germany, the US and Norway, endured, losing gold medal favourites and world champions amid more than 400 Olympic infections.
INTERNATIONAL Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach will laud China’s hosting of the Games in a pandemic during tomorrow’s closing ceremony with scant reference to the toll on the athletes.
No doubt he will even refer to competitors’ resilience as some sort of badge to wear with pride. He will talk about “pulling together’’. But what could be missing from his speech is one word: fair.
Bach has enjoyed chauffeur-driven cars, top food and heated boots and the IOC coffers have swelled from the broadcaster fees for having put on the Games. The athletes are kept in a prison-like village, with no ability to get out to experience local life, and are sent home a day after finishing their competition. Many of them will ponder how their meticulous preparations were thrown off course by having a Games in a country intent on zero Covid.
This week was the Chinese Lantern Festival, but those inside the heavily guarded Olympics “closed loop” could only imagine the family gatherings and eating of sweet dumplings.
Athletes have spent the Games on tenterhooks about whether they will face the same fate as Riiber — locked up without training equipment, presented with substandard food and subjected to daily tonsil scrapes.
This cannot be dismissed as just another Olympic hurdle.
Winter Olympics, conducted in the mountains in deeply chilly conditions, are always a logistic challenge. But this time, without crowds, getting around was a bit easier than normal.
Yet everyone was grumpy from the constant testing, weeks of wearing heavy-duty masks, harassment from the “mask police’’, intermittent Wi-Fi and illogical orders from volunteers. Athlete emotions were particularly raw, the toll of the past two years evident in their tears.
A tight enforcement of rules extended to the field of play. In the women’s ski jump, five competitors were disqualified and Japan, Norway, Austria and Germany were ruled out of the teams medal because their ski suit pants were two centimetres too big.
Katharina Althaus of Germany said: “(Ski authority) FIS destroyed women’s ski jumping. I have been checked so many times in 11 years of ski jumping, and I have never been disqualified once. I know my suit was compliant.”
The biggest scandal has been how the International Olympic Committee has been scrambling to contain the political fallout from allowing the doeeyed teenage Russian Kamila Valieva to dominate skating competition. Her twirling around the rules after having tested positive to a banned heart medication has consumed global headlines and is the biggest crisis since the Ben Johnson steroid scandal in the 1988 Olympics.
Valieva’s appearance in the Olympic women’s figure skate competition has illustrated that the IOC is not in control of its own event, having outsourced the testing to the Independent Testing Agency and the punishment to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
So the integrity of the Games can be shredded once again by Russia some eight years after the statesponsored cheating program at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
The 100 members of the IOC, most of whom were at home watching the Winter Games, have been exposed as irrelevant and impotent.
At this very moment, the Olympics are in a dark place. However, as everyone sighs with relief that the 2022 ordeal is nearly over, the future Olympic editions in Paris, MilanCortina, Los Angeles and then in 2032 in Brisbane have never looked so inviting. The reputation of the Olympic Games must surely bounce back.
MANY ARE PASSING A VERDICT OF ‘WORST OLYMPICS SINCE MUNICH 1972’