Never has sport had such a big basket of filthy washing
Yes, China delivered a visual spectacular, but...
UnDer the blasts of thousands of fireworks and other sources of piping hot air, these 24th and most troubled of Winter olympics were declared open last night.
If you have to credit the Chinese organisers, if you still feel compelled to do so, then they certainly know how to put on a show.
of course, whether you actually bought what we were seeing at the Bird’s nest stadium, of united communities and global togetherness depends on your opinion of bigger pictures. and how much you can swallow.
Certainly, the Chinese nailed the script they wanted so badly to perform. on matters of pyrotechnics and choreographed dance, it was just about perfect — truly a visual spectacular.
But for taste? For brazenness? Goodness, the folk at the International olympic Committee and Beijing 2022 had more front than the Great Wall.
Perhaps the only detail worth knowing is that when it was all said and nearly all done after two hours, they sent a pair of female Chinese athletes up to the cauldron with a torch. one of them was a cross-country skier named Dinigeer yilamujiang and she is a uyghur from Xinjiang. Bloody hell, they even filmed her delighted family.
Which to those who came up with the stunt was all very clever. To other uyghurs, and other families, quite possibly not.
We heard claims last week about one million uyghurs and Turkic muslims in ‘re-education’ camps. of terrifying accounts of torture, sterilisations, mass rape and disappearances, delivered under the pretence of anti-extremism.
We have been told of thousands of family members abroad ringing into phones that have not been answered since 2017. of Tibet and hong Kong and brutal oppression by the Chinese Government. of ‘crimes against humanity’ in the detailed view of human rights Watch. They call an olympics on such bloodied soil ‘sportwashing’.
The feeling among those who truly know this terrible topic is that the human rights situation in China has escalated dramatically in the 14 years since this same city hosted the summer Games of 2008.
Back then, the main clouds of note were smog; the cloud over this colder product is considerably darker, nastier and scarier.
Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t enjoy the sport over the next fortnight, just that we should face the right direction while we do so and hope against all sensible judgment for better decisions from those blind-eyed buffoons at the IoC in future.
as ever, the sport will thrill us, in the weird, wonderful and unfamiliar ways that the Winter olympics often can.
Just like its warmer cousin, it will bring you in with its unparalleled ability to fuse sporting excellence with delightful tales.
Just consider a few of those behind the 91 flags that paraded yesterday. There were the Jamaicans and their bobsleigh team, breathing new life into the memories of an old film. Their pilot, shanwayne stephens, trained in Peterborough during the first Covid lockdown and improvised by pushing around his fiancee’s mini Cooper.
When he took his seat in the stadium after the parade, he was soon joined by richardson Viano, a skier from haiti.
In time they were accompanied by nathan Crumpton, from american samoa. he had walked his lap half naked and coated in oil; on monday he will slide down a track in yanqing on a skeleton sled.
For Team GB, five medals would be excellent, six a record. one of their best, Dave ryding, is a gem. his dad used to sell ladies underwear on a market stall and the World Cup-winning skier is chasing a dream of reaching the slalom podium via a dry slope in Pendle, Lancashire.
Who can say where the cards will fall or whether the strict closed loop of Beijing 2022 will continue to suffocate those within it. already there are gripes that this could be one of the most logistically chaotic Games since atlanta in 1996. In the scheme of things, that is of trivial importance.
But a bigger deal is what is being endorsed here, and enabled when folk like the IoC president Thomas Bach talk of the Games being beyond ‘political disputes’. as if an ant could ever have a meaningful dispute with a magnifying glass. When Bach was done patting his own back, he handed over to the Chinese leader Xi Jinping to declare it all open and a uyghur lit the flame, all before the eyes of Vladimir Putin.
sport has never had such a big basket of filthy washing. l BruCe mouaT and Jenn Dodds blew a 6-1 lead against australia before holding their nerve to win 9-8 on an extra end.
It leaves them third in the table at the halfway point.
The scots, who have a doubleheader today with the Czech republic and unbeaten Italy, boast three wins from their first four games.