POLITICAL GAMES

CHINA’S POLICIES IN HONG KONG HAVE SPARKED PROTEST AND INTERNATIONAL OUTRAGE. IN BEIJING, ALL EYES WILL BE ON ATHLETES REPRESENTING THAT REGION

SIDNEY CHU stumbled across the news—at once exhilarating and guaranteed to drop him at the center of a geopolitical firestorm— one night in late December while scrolling through Facebook. “All of a sudden I see this post,” he says. It was a press release from the Hong Kong Skating Union, officially announcing that the 22-year-old short-track speedskater would represent his native land at the Winter Olympics. Nobody had contacted him, so first Chu called an HKSU official to make sure there was no mistake. “Then I immediately called my parents,” Chu says. “We just talked about how it was the culmination of all the hours and hours of hard work that I put into my skating career.”

The journey began around age 10, when Chu quit playing hockey with his international school friends. “I liked the speed,” he says, “but I didn’t like getting concussions and pushed [around] by people who are so much bigger than me.” Taking inspiration from a Youtube video of U.S. Olympian Apolo Anton Ohno, he signed up instead for an introductory speedskating class at one of the two ice rinks in Hong Kong. “I fell in love with the feeling of going fast,” Chu says. “Like being in a race car, but instead of wheels it’s your own two feet.”

With the class meeting only once a week, though, he was forced to get creative to satisfy his new passion, frequenting a packaged-meat cold-storage facility with his father, Michael. There they would hose down a small section of cement floor and let the water freeze before Sidney laced up to hone his pushing and gliding techniques.

He joined Hong Kong’s youth speedskating program at 12, busing five hours round-trip to rigorous drill sessions on mainland China. Next came two years of high school in Changchun, a city in northeast China, separated from his family to gain what he calls “my first experience of real professional training.” A fractured ankle, suffered in a fall during practice, hampered Chu’s bid for the 2018 Games. But he kept at it: When he moved Stateside to attend George Washington later that year, he would set his alarm to 3:30 a.m. to squeeze in predawn workouts with the Potomac Speedskating Club.

It all resulted in overwhelming joy when Chu read that he had been selected to race in the 500 meters in Beijing, where he will become only Hong Kong’s fifth Olympic speedskater ever. A teammate had clinched the spot in qualifying, but Hong Kong’s Olympic committee ruled that he did not meet its residency requirement, leaving Chu to take his place. “I wish I’d had some champagne bottles to spray,” Chu says. “Always wanted to do that.”

Once that feeling subsided, though, Chu was hit with a thought that kept him from falling asleep for the rest of the night: “It was like, Holy crap, I actually have to go.” Not just because of the usual pressure to make his home proud, especially with Hong Kong coming off a record six-medal haul last summer in Tokyo. “I don’t want to screw up and embarrass my butt on TV,” he says.

But also because Chu understands that he will be taking center stage in a uniquely tense global drama when he glides to the starting line inside Beijing’s glass-encrusted speedskating center (aka the “Ice Ribbon”) for his first heat on Feb. 11. As Chu explains, “There’s a pressure that you’re not just representing you and your team. You’re representing an entire geopolitical situation.”

IN THE FOUR YEARS since the 2018 Olympics, the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping has tightened its grip over Hong Kong, which had previously maintained a large measure of sovereignty under Beijing’s “one country, two systems” policy. Overwhelmingly peaceful protests have been met with harsh police crackdowns. Activists, newspaper editors and pop stars alike have been arrested on charges of sedition under a sweeping national security law implemented in June ’20. Last year, the election system was overhauled to require a loyalty pledge from candidates.

Hong Kong is hardly the only territory where the Chinese government is documented to be actively committing large-scale human rights abuses, such as the genocide of Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region and the torture of Tibetan Buddhists. While the U.S. and other nations have announced diplomatic boycotts of the Games, the IOC has doubled down on China, even aiding its efforts to spin the apparent silencing of Peng Shuai after the women’s tennis star in November described sexual assault by a former party leader.

The Hong Kong delegation will be tiny—just Chu and two skiers: 18-year-old Adrian Yung and 19-year-old Audrey King. None is expected to reach the podium— Hong Kong has never won a winter medal—but that won’t stop the spotlight from fixing on them. Nor will it stop viewers from projecting meaning onto them—meanings that will often contradict.

“Because of the incredible pressure China is putting on the Hong Kong democracy movement,” says Jules Boykoff, a Pacific University political scientist focused on the politics of sports, “the mere presence of someone from Hong Kong will be a reminder of that grim repression.”

“They’re symbols of Hong Kong spirit, of Hong Kong culture,” says Mary Gallagher, a Michigan political science professor who studies Chinese politics. “It’s a good thing for Hong Kong to be able to preserve this separate identity with the flag, with a separate team.”

“Hong Kong has always been able to send athletes on its own terms [since 1952], so representation alone, I don’t see any [meaning] there,” says Lynette Ong, a political science professor at the University of Toronto focused on authoritarianism in China. “Now, hypothetically speaking, if those athletes go out to make statements about Hong Kong independence from Beijing, then that’s a completely different story.”

AS WITH CHU, it was the thrill of speed that first attracted Yung to his sport. “I was just a bit of a crazy child,” says Yung, who was born in Malaysia but lived in his father’s native Hong Kong until age 5, when his family moved to England. “I’d just go down straight and occasionally nearly hit an unsuspecting adult.”

He proved just as fast a learner, earning a spot on England’s under14 alpine national squad at 12. Still, Yung never saw making the Olympics as realistic—“i didn’t think I was good enough”—until he was recruited to Hong Kong’s team in 2018. “It still feels like I’m stuck in a dream,” he says over Zoom. “I never thought I’d have such a special stage to represent Hong Kong on.”

Also on the video call is the chairman of the Hong Kong Ski Association, Edmond Yue. When a question touching on the political situation comes up, Yue shakes his head and interjects before Yung can answer. “Politics, we try to keep that out of the way,” he says. “It’s the Olympics. It’s about the athletes.”

Eventually, Yung adds, “My job

RIGHTS UNDER FIRE Hong Kong’s democracy protests, like this one from 2019, have provoked a severe response from the authorities.

is just to ski well and ski fast. And hopefully bring a good result for Hong Kong and make them proud.”

Whether any demonstrations will be staged inside the Beijing bubble remains to be seen. But, given the dangers posed by the host, academics and activists alike agree that no athlete representing an area under China’s control should bear responsibility for speaking out. “If it’s an athlete with some ethnic ties to China, then it could lead to some kind of legal charges that could detain the person in China for a long period of time,” Gallagher says.

Experts also wonder how much of the onus even Olympians from democratic societies should carry. Rule 50.2 of the Olympic charter was relaxed last summer to allow political protests in certain areas, like mixed-zone interviews, but still bars them atop the podium.

“The penalties are so draconian,” says Nikki Dryden, a human rights lawyer who swam for Canada at the 1992 and ’96 Games. “Losing medals, erasure from the record book, removal of credentials.” An athlete would have to be well informed and willing to take a significant risk, she says. “And that’s not a position we should be putting them in.”

So far, a handful of U.S. Olympians have spoken out against China. But, as Gallagher notes, citing the backlash endured by the NBA after then Rockets GM Daryl Morey’s “Free Hong Kong” tweet in 2019, China’s silencing efforts have a “very ambitious reach.” The goal is self-censorship, and it seems to be working: One U.S. athlete headed to Beijing says they received a mass email from a Usopc-contracted PR official strongly recommending that they and their teammates avoid making political statements “directed toward China” until they had safely returned to U.S. soil. The USOPC did not reply to requests for comment.

“The IOC has failed to create the protections for athletes to participate safely,” says Minky Worden, director of global initiatives for the nonprofit Human Rights Watch. “It’s the one job the IOC has.”

Brian Leung, the executive director of the D.c.-based Hong Kong Democracy Council, points the finger at the billion-dollar corporations that financially benefit from the Olympics. “We’re looking at those collective organizations to voice out so the individual athlete can be protected,” Leung says. Athletes such as Chu, Yung and King. “They are heroes to us, right?” Leung says. “For them to continue to raise the profile for Hong Kong people, for them to have major achievement internationally, it’s something we take pride in.”

Having lived in the U.S., Hong Kong and mainland China, Chu is well aware of the political third rails that connect these places. “I remember my mom [Wendy] telling me, ‘When you go to China, don’t talk too much about living in the U.S., and on the western side, you don’t want to be too praising of China in any sort of way,’ ” he says. Speaking over the phone from Hong Kong, Chu invokes this advice to explain the tightrope walk that he now must take with every media request (of which he reports receiving more than ever). “Being part of this delegation in such a precarious situation, we really have to watch what we say because it’ll go viral,” he says. “In these situations, where athletes pour their entire lives into sport, into developing their own skills—just because of where they were born and where these Olympics are, they should not be pulled into someone else’s political game.”

Instead, when he laces up his skates in Beijing, he wants to do what he has done since he was a boy waiting for water to freeze inside a cold-storage facility: take off down the track, like in a race car but on his own two feet.

“It’s a good thing for Hong Kong to be able to preserve this separate identity with the flag, with a separate team,” Gallagher says.