WINTER GAMES OF DISCONTENT
Athletes left freezing as wind chill makes it feel like -35c on the slopes, and coaches complain about a lack of hot food and the extreme Covid protocols
THE Winter Olympics were reduced to the Hunger Games after frozen stars complained of a lack of food to help keep them warm.
On only the second day of competition the Swedish cross-country team moaned that it was too cold in the mountains of China.
The Germans blasted organisers for an absence of cooked dinners as temperatures, combined with wind chill, plunged below -20 degrees Celsius.
And athletes and officials from Finland, Russia and Poland joined the chorus of dissent by taking Beijing chiefs to task over extreme Covid isolation protocols which, it is claimed, have left athletes traumatised.
“There are no hot meals,” German ski coach Christian Schwaiger raged. “The catering is extremely questionable because, really, it’s not catering at all.
“I would have expected that the Olympic Committee is capable of providing hot meals.”
The blue riband men’s downhill race was postponed until today after strong winds in Yanqing blew the alpine schedule off course.
Seventy-five miles to the north-west the cold cut so deep in Zhangjiakou that Sweden called for races to start earlier in the day.
Team boss Anders Bystrom spoke out as Frida Karlsson (right) shook with cold after finishing fifth in the women’s skiathlon.
“Frida was completely destroyed by the cold,” he said. The International Ski Federation (FIS) has a cold weather limit of -20C, but wind chill here is taking it well below that.
“If FIS says it’s -17 and it’s -35 with the wind chill, what do you do then?” Bystrom asked. “We have talked about making a request to race earlier during the day.”
The bad feeling towards the organisation of these 24th Winter Games snowballed into an avalanche of complaints over Covid counter measures.
The coach of the Finnish men’s ice hockey team accused China of not respecting a player’s human rights, claiming former NHL star Marko Anttila was being kept in isolation for no reason.
“We know that he’s fully healthy and ready to go,” he said.
“That’s why we think that China, for some reason, won’t respect his human rights and that’s not a great situation.”
More than 350 Games participants, many of them athletes, have tested positive on arrival in Beijing since January 23.
The rules of release from special quarantine hotels are being free of symptoms and to deliver two negative PCR tests 24 hours apart.
Russian biathlete Valeria Vasnetsova said: “My stomach hurts, I’m very pale and I have huge black circles around my eyes. I cry every day. I want all this to end.”
Natalia Maliszewska, let out on the day of her event only to miss her competition after testing positive again, admitted: “I have been living in fear.”
The Polish short track speed skater added. “I cry until I have no more tears. Without prospect my hope has died. This is a big joke.
“I hope whoever is managing this has a lot of fun. My heart and my mind can’t take this any more.”