Mick Hartley

Oh dear. Apparently athletes at the Beijing Winter Olympics are not happy:

Athletes have been hitting out at Olympic organisers, with complaints about freezing conditions and quarantine rules pouring in.

Beijing kicked off the Winter Games four days ago, promising it would be "streamlined, safe and splendid".

Some have lauded China's efforts to ensure a relatively virus-free Games.

But some participants say they are living and training in dismal conditions, prompting them to lobby organisers for improvements.

That's not the half of it. Ian Williams in the Spectator:

Never before have the participants in a major sporting event been so closely monitored as in this Winter Olympics in Beijing. The 1980 Summer Olympics in Soviet Moscow were nothing in comparison. Athletes are competing under a blanket of observation, ostensibly to keep Covid at bay, yet imposed by a paranoid Communist party for whom critical words or thoughts are as dangerous as any virus.

Everyone attending the games, including athletes, support staff and media, must install on their phones an app, My 2022, which harvests a wide range of personal data. It has the ability to censor and track its users, according to cybersecurity experts who have examined the app. The app is used to submit health information such as Covid test results and vaccination status. Other functions include real-time chat, voice audio chat, file transfers, as well as news and weather updates about the Olympic Games.

Spyware specialists at the Citizen Lab, a research institute at the University of Toronto, said it was unclear with whom or which organisations the app shared the information, and that the app also included features allowing users to report ‘politically sensitive’ content. It also contained a censorship keyword list, giving the authorities the ability to block discussion of issues such as Xinjiang or Tibet. The researchers also said encryption vulnerabilities meant the app could be easily hacked.

The games have duly been dubbed the ‘burner phone Olympics’ after a number of western countries, including Britain, warned against bringing personal phones or laptops to Beijing. This was out of fear that the Chinese authorities could install spyware to extract personal information and monitor future activity. ‘It should be assumed that every text, email, online visit, and application access can be monitored or compromised,’ said a United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee advisory….

The pandemic, and China’s increasingly desperate ‘zero Covid’ policy, has been a perfect testbed for Xi Jinping’s surveillance state, enabling him to rapidly bring together a range of claustrophobic tools — all in the name of fighting an international health crisis. These will certainly outlive the virus, with the notion of ‘health’ extended to include all manner of words, thoughts and behaviour the CCP deems unhealthy. Olympic athletes are now getting their experience of Xi’s panopticon.

Last week, president Vladimir Putin said that Russia and China oppose the ‘politicisation of sport’. This followed the political theatre of his meeting with Xi Jinping, held on the same day as the opening ceremony, during which they put on a united front against the West.

In the days that followed, Beijing has proceeded to do just that — politicise the games. Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a cross-country skier of Uighur descent, was picked as one of the two final torch-bearers at the opening ceremony. This was widely seen as China’s response to accusations of vast human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Having served her purpose, the 20-year-old finished 43rd in her event and promptly disappeared from the spotlight.

Then Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, was used again in a role he seems to relish — a political prop for the Communist party. Over the weekend, he reportedly held a private meeting with Peng Shuai, the Chinese tennis player who disappeared after making sexual abuse accusations against a senior Communist party official last November. An IOC statement on Monday did not address Peng’s accusations, merely saying that Peng was at the Winter Olympics and attending events.

Earlier Peng had given an interview to the French sports daily L’Equipe, in which she said her accusation had been a misunderstanding. The interview was arranged on Sunday by China’s Olympic committee, and the newspaper said it had been required to submit questions for Peng in advance, and her comments in Chinese were translated by a Chinese Olympic committee official. Most people familiar with Communist party intimidation regard any statement made by Peng as not credible while she remains in China.

Just days into the Winter Olympics and the games are shaping up to be a highly political event — though pity the hapless athletes. Watched, tracked, monitored, they are whisked away and locked up in grim isolation wards at the hint of Covid, with only their burner phones for company.

Our media have generally tried bravely to stay clear of the political side, reporting breathlessly on events on the ski slope while avoiding any mention of the Uighurs or, god forbid, parallels with the 1936 Berlin Olympics. We've heard endlessly over the past few days about how much the great and the good have been offended and horrified at Jimmy Carr's Holocaust joke (hint: it was an off-colour joke by a comedian who specialises in off-colour jokes), but hardly anything about an actual genocide taking place in the host country of the current Winter Olympics. Well, those seem to be our priorities at the moment…