This weekend, the Winter Olympics finally draws to a conclusion in Beijing.
It has been an astonishing fortnight with coverage lurching from one crisis to another, crowding out headlines on sporting prowess, with all involved coming out tarnished.
As a Brit, I was lucky enough to attend the Summer Olympic Games in London in 2012. It was an inspirational event, with British success loudly celebrated locally, but all winners were given the respect and adulation they deserved for achieving what was, in those days, seen as the very pinnacle of sporting achievement.
The London Olympics was everything the Olympic Games should be. Who would have thought that just 10 years later, the Olympic star could have dimmed so much?
Let’s put aside the issue of using the Olympics as a tool for sportswashing China’s myriad of human rights atrocities, the horrendous greed of the International Olympic Committee and its chair, Thomas Bach, and the abandonment of the values and ideals on which the Olympics were built.
Instead, let’s just assess the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics from a purely sporting perspective. It makes for harrowing reading.
The only real place to start is with the case of Kamila Valieva. She is a 15-year-old figure skater who is competing for the Russian Olympic Committee rather than Russia because of that country's long and proven record of state-sponsored doping programs.
Valieva tested positive for trimetazidine, a performance-enhancing substance, on February 8th. Not one but three different suspicious substances were found in her system.
Yet the Court of Arbitration for Sport cleared her to compete, largely because of her age. Even the seemingly shameless International Olympic Committee seemed stunned by the decision, quickly announcing that if she won, there would be no medal ceremony since it would “not be appropriate.”
She was the favorite to win gold, which could have meant that a skater who has tested positive for performance-enhancing substances, from a country with a known record of state-sponsored doping, could have deprived another athlete competing cleanly of the medal she deserves. Fortunately for all concerned, she ended up finishing outside the medal table.
Valieva was not the only cheat at the Winter Olympics. Chinese speed skater Fan Kexin was caught on camera flicking a marker onto the track to cause Canadian opponent Alyson Charles to crash out and fellow Canadian, Florence Brunelle, to be disqualified after initially being blamed.
This was not the only incident of cheating on the ice, and again it was Chinese athletes who were at the center of the controversy.
In the final of the men’s 1,000m short track speed skating event, Ren Ziwei defeated Hungary’s Shaolin Sándor Liu after the Hungarian was given two penalties for allegedly changing lanes and using his left hand to obstruct the Chinese skater.
Ren himself was seen shoving Liu with two hands yet received no penalty for this infraction and subsequently took the gold. He was disqualified from the 1,500m short track semi-final for a similar indiscretion later.
Meanwhile, in the men’s mixed team event, the Chinese team only made it to the final after a video review saw the judges penalize both the USA and Russian Olympic Committee teams for questionable infractions.
China went on to claim gold, a situation summed up by South Korean skater Kwak Yoon-gy who said, “Looking at the way China won the gold medal… I thought to myself, ‘Is this really what winning a gold medal is all about?’ Things all just felt very hollow.”
It was a similar story on the ski jump as well, where no fewer than five different female athletes were disqualified from the event for the dubious infraction of having jumpsuits that were deemed too large and said to give them an unfair advantage.
The victims were Sara Takanashi of Japan, Daniela Iraschko-Stolz of Austria, Katharina Althaus of Germany, and Anna Odine Stroem and Silje Opseth of Norway. Althaus didn’t hold back on her views after the decision, telling journalists that organizers had “destroyed women’s ski jumping.”
Then there are the significant question marks over the number of Chinese competitors who have taken up Chinese citizenship to enable them to compete for the communist dictatorship in the games.
The most prominent of those is Eileen Gu, who was born and raised in the USA. China does not permit dual citizenship, but Gu has shown no proof that she has relinquished her American citizenship, raising questions about which flag she should be representing.
“I'm American when I'm in the U.S., and I'm Chinese when I'm in China," Gu said in one recent press conference, only serving to fan the flames of controversy.
She is the highest profile of at least three dozen members of the Chinese Olympic team who were not born in China and whose citizenship is unclear.
Why would China want to acquire non-Chinese athletes for these Olympics? To win medals, of course. The Beijing Winter Olympics has only ever been about one thing for the Chinese Communist Party: propaganda.
Which does really beg the question of how much longer other athletes and democratic nations who believe in competing on a level playing field and winning medals on merit and ability, rather than through cheating and doping, will continue to hold the Olympics in such high regard.
The Beijing Winter Olympics has been another step into the abyss for this once great sporting movement that is now a puppet of wealthy dictators and autocrats. In China, their influence has stretched beyond the organization and finances of the Games and into the sporting arena more than ever before.
If future Olympics are going to simply be a platform for countries like China and Russia to cheat their way to victory, it begs the question as to whether it is even worth turning up.
