How will Beijing 2022 be remembered? Described as the Genocide Games by human rights groups, it is a Winter Olympics virtually devoid of snow and one entirely run in a bubble shut off from the prying eyes of the Chinese public.
When IOC members selected the Chinese capital by 44 votes to 40 ahead of Almaty in Kazakhstan, this is as far away from what they could have imagined.
Overly intrusive PCR tests with messages such as “the tonsils are exposed when you retch so don’t hide when you’re retching” are delivered to athletes and others, most advised to travel with burner phones over fears of state surveillance.
Whether IOC president Thomas Bach has found the pre-Games questioning uncomfortable, from the treatment of China’s Uyghur population to the safety and wellbeing of tennis player Peng Shuai, who he has promised to meet in the coming days, remains unclear such is the positive vibe he likes to give off.
But for him and the rest of the Olympic movement, there is surely a desperation for the Games to officially get under way inside the Bird’s Nest on Friday night (12pm GMT), when Beijing will officially become the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Games.
What does it mean from a British perspective? At the last two versions, in Sochi and PyeongChang, Team GB came home with five medals. The expectation is of something similar — a range of three to seven medals — although female curling skip Eve Muirhead made the point that three medals could come from the curling alone.
Already Jen Dodds and Bruce Mouat are faring well in the mixed curling, having picked up three wins in four encounters.
Also on the ice, there are medal possibles with Brad Hall’s crews in the men’s bobsleigh, while Britain have habitually timed their preparation to perfection in the women’s skeleton. Since the sport’s addition to the Olympic programme, Britain have never not won a medal.
On the snow, Charlotte Bankes is as much of a banker for a gold medal as is possible in the mad dash that is snowboard cross as world champion and runaway World Cup leader.
Four years ago, the British-born athlete, whose family had relocated to France in her youth, was in Gallic colours. The other notable switch of allegiance in the 50-strong team is Gus Kenworthy, like Bankes born in Briton but, in his case, moulded in the United States.
Alongside Muirhead as the flag bearer for the opening ceremony is Dave Ryding, who is a medal contender in the slalom, while a litany of currently unheralded names — the Atkin sisters Izzy and Zoe — or Kirsty Muir could all sneak their way onto the podium if conditions allow.
All look likely to be upstaged by another freeskier in Eileen Gu, every bit the poster girl for Beijing 2022. Brought up in the US, she has opted to compete for China in the city where her mother was born. As well as being a phenomenal athlete, the 18-year-old’s message is one of trying to bridge relations between China and the United States.
With America among 15 countries to have employed a diplomatic boycott of these Games, for all her acrobatic brilliance, one suspects Gu has her work cut out.
For Gu and every other athlete, flying to Beijing was always a gamble so stringent is the Covid testing.
American bobsleigh athlete Elana Meyers Taylor finds herself locked in a hotel room with her two-year-old son after a positive test. Kim Meylemans, who had previously had Covid back in Belgium weeks before flying out, sent a tearful message over her strict confinement before her release to the athlete village.
Thirty four years after Eddie the Eagle soared — or perhaps staggered — into global notoriety, there is nothing quite on a par this time around.
And many have not made it here at all, a litany of past champions and medal favourites unable to board their respective planes out to China such is the impact of Omicron in particular.
Thirty four years after Eddie the Eagle soared — or perhaps staggered — into global notoriety at the Calgary Olympics, there is nothing quite on a par this time around.
But there is at least a new Jamaican bobsleigh team inspired, they say, by the film Cool Runnings and their own countrymen from that same Games in 1988.
And for China, the message is two fold, to show themselves off to the rest of the world as well as president Xi Jinping’s target to get 300 million of the population into winter sports in the next three years. The next two weeks has its work cut out.
