The Daily Telegraph

China abandons sale of Olympics tickets

- By Jamie Johnson

CHINA has cancelled plans to sell tickets for the Beijing Winter Olympics as rising omicron cases threaten to bring its zero-covid policy crashing down.

Athletes and officials have already started to arrive in the capital before the games, which start on Feb 4, entering a tightly controlled bubble separating them from the rest of the population.

But the general public will no longer be invited to join, and are being replaced instead by hand-picked spectators.

The move heaps further embarrassm­ent on Beijing after preparatio­ns for the games were hit by a widespread diplomatic boycott on human rights grounds.

China has spent an estimated £2.95billion on the games, including on a new high-speed rail link to some of the venues where 1.2million cubic metres of artificial snow has been pumped onto sports tracks. China is facing a major test to its policy of stopping Covid while much of the rest of the world begins to pivot to living with the disease.

It is unclear how the hand-picked spectators will be selected, but under one scenario local sponsors, government officials and possibly soldiers would be present in the stands.

No internatio­nal spectators will be permitted into the country.

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