Russia's Olympic Doping Case Helps China Skirt Dicey Topics

Little more than a week ago, the questions from non-Chinese reporters at daily Olympics briefings were about sensitive things involving China — tennis player Peng Shuai, the government’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the northwest, the efficiency of the anti-COVID “closed-loop system.”

These days, they’re all about a drug scandal — the one with Russia at the center — and not much else.

The doping saga unfolding around Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva has been a Games-changer at the Beijing Olympics, pushing aside dicey topics that Chinese officials like to avoid answering.

“The big winner in the Valieva scandal is the Chinese government,” Olympic historian David Wallechinsky said in an email. He has been a consistent critic of China’s government and stayed away from these Games, his first Olympic absence since 1988.

“What a relief for them to not have to fend off comments about human rights,” Wallechinsky quipped.

The focus is now on 15-year-old Valieva, which will continue through her long program on Thursday when she is expected to win gold — her second of the Games — but be banned from any medal ceremony after failing a pre-Games doping test.

The IOC has said it “would not be appropriate to hold the medal ceremony” with her case sure to wind up again in the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which ruled on Monday that she could compete. She seems sure to dominate the briefings until the Games end on Sunday, leaving room for little else.

Peng, once the world’s No. 1-ranked tennis doubles player, made sexual assault allegations against a former high-ranking member of China’s ruling Communist Party. The charges three months ago were scrubbed immediately from China’s censored internet, placing the subject out of bounds for Chinese reporters.

Yang Shu’an, the high-profile organizing committee vice president, nearly stumbled in a briefing when — speaking in English — he was asked about Peng and almost mentioned her by name. Of course, saying it would acknowledge that Chinese officials are aware of her case.

China’s internment of at least 1 million Uyghurs has been termed genocide by the United States and others, which China calls the “lie of the century.” This topic is also off limits for Chinese reporters and, by its own choice, the International Olympic Committee.

“The position of the IOC must be, given the political neutrality, that we are not commenting on political issues,” IOC President Thomas Bach said at the briefing Feb. 3, the day before the Games opened. Bach also seldom mentions the Uyghurs by name.

Still, uncomfortable queries about Peng and the Uyghurs kept coming as the Games opened. COVID-19 questions were popular, too, as was criticism about China’s “case-hardened” bubble that separates reporters and athletes from 20 million Beijing residents.

There was a question about Jack Ma, China’s e-commerce billionaire who has largely disappeared from public view. Ma is the founder of the Alibaba Group, which is a major IOC sponsor.

There were persistent questions about athletes’ safety if their comments upset officials of China’s authoritarian government. But those began to fade as few spoke up.

Then came Feb. 9: Day 5 of the Olympics.

“A situation arose today at short notice which requires legal consultation,” IOC spokesman Adams said. “You’ll appreciate because there are legal implications involved that I can’t talk very much about it at this stage.”

Non-Chinese reporters quizzed Adams about the details for days. Questions from Chinese state-controlled media continued to center on soliciting laudatory comments about the venues, offering praise of the efficient organization — and laments about the scarce supply of Bing Dwen Dwen panda mascots.

Much news is local, so Chinese reporters are not alone in this. But not one offered a question about Valieva as non-Chinese continued to press Adams about the unfolding mystery.

“I can’t give you any more details,” Adams said. He repeated this for several days in varied forms. “I’m afraid, as you know, legal issues can sometimes drag on.”

After days of dominating the briefings, news came Monday that Valieva had been cleared to compete despite failing a pre-Games drug test. She skates this week and is the favorite to win the gold on Thursday, where she may lead a 1-2-3 sweep by Russian women.

And everybody’s watching. They’ll be doing so not just for her skating prowess, but for the next chapter in the saga of a girl buffeted by powerful forces and a nation known for doing what it takes to get the outcome it wants.

A nation that, for the moment, isn’t China.

“This is likely a welcome distraction from other potential subversions or critiques of the Games and of China at large,” Maria Repnikova, a China expert at Georgia State University, said in a email to Associated Press.

“Since the Olympics tend to present apt opportunities for the international community to investigate and widely report on the host country, having a scandal that takes the attention away from China in this case plays in favor of Chinese authorities.”

Olympic Curling Is a Family Affair for US Women and Others

BEIJING — 

When she settled into her room at the athlete’s village in Beijing, American curler Nina Roth decorated a wall with family photos to remind herself of the support she has back home.

Her teammates brought the real thing.

Skip Tabitha Peterson needs only to look down the ice for a comforting face: Her sister, Tara, is also on the U.S. women’s team. Becca Hamilton’s brother is playing for the American men, giving them something most athletes at these Olympics can’t have — family in Beijing to support them.

“To be able to lean on my brother — and I guess it’s the same for the sisters on my team, they have each other — it’s just awesome to have some sort of family here,” Becca Hamilton said. “I mean it’s not always rainbows and butterflies. But for the most part, it’s great.”

Much like last year’s Summer Games in Tokyo, the Winter Olympics are being played in only partially filled venues and without foreign fans. China has also imposed travel restrictions in an attempt to control the spread of COVID-19.

That forced most athletes to leave at home the small entourage of friends and relatives that would ordinarily accompany them to the Olympics — part of the payoff for helping them reach the pinnacle of their sport.

“This is such an opportunity, that our family members also work for, and none of us would be able to do this without their support,” said Roth, who also competed in Pyeongchang. “It was really good fun to celebrate with them at the last Olympics. So it’s a big bummer that they can’t be here this time.”

But some of her teammates found the perfect way to get around the restrictions. The Hamiltons competed as a mixed doubles pair four years ago and are still spending plenty of time together at these Olympics.

“I’ve got, like, one of my best friends and my curling partner here,” Matt Hamilton said. “Not only do I have a sister and a confidant in here, I’ve got someone who’ll do my laundry. … So she really takes care of me while we’re out here.”

They aren’t the only families hanging out at the Ice Cube curling venue this month.

The mixed doubles field last week featured two married couples: Norway’s Magnus Nedregotten and Kristin Skaslien, who won the silver medal, and Czechs Zuzana Paulova and Tomas Paul. Canadian men’s and women’s players Jocelyn Peterman and Brett Gallant are engaged, with plans to wed in June.

And the Danish women’s curling team also includes a pair of sisters, Madeleine and Denise Dupont.

“I think it just makes the bond between us a lot stronger,” Madeleine Dupont said. “I can’t imagine not seeing her all the time.”

A niche sport played mostly in a few colder climes, curling has long been a family affair, passed down from parents like a treasured heirloom or favorite recipe.

Norway’s Magnus Vaagberg is the son of two Olympic curlers. His father, Lars, and uncle Paal Trulsen won gold in 2002 in a foursome that also included Magnus’ current teammate — and six-time Olympian — Torger Nergaard.

“I remember staying up late, understanding that something cool had happened,” said Vaagberg, who was 7 at the time. “That’s something very unique with curling, a tight family bond all over. So you play against the people that played against my father at the time, and their sons and daughters, it’s quite cool.”

The Petersons’ mother grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and picked up curling from her father. She taught it to her daughters, who started when they were 10 and 8; a brother, Trent, also curled for a while before turning to professional golf.

“You’re kind of born into the sport,” Tara Peterson said.

While siblings might be expected to team up, there’s no guarantee that they’ll get along over the hundreds of hours they spend together practicing, playing and traveling to tournaments each year. Tensions between any set of teammates can boil over — even before adding in the additional resentment over who wrecked the family car or neglected to take out the trash.

Madeleine Dupont said she and her sister used to fight about curling until their mother would give them a time out.

“When we were young, 100%, my mom was always like, ‘Now we need curling-free time. You can’t talk about curling all the time,'” she said. “Now we all live separate places, so it’s not a problem anymore. But it’s still hard to just leave it at the rink.”

Nedregotten said he and Skaslien do what they call a “hot wash” — talking out their feelings before moving on to the next match. Mostly, though, the siblings and spouses say teaming up with a relative might even offer a competitive edge.

“We’re on the same page a lot without even really need to say anything,” Tabitha Peterson said. “If there is any conflict, or whatever, I think it’s easier as siblings to kind of forgive and forget a lot quicker.”

American men’s skip John Shuster is at his fifth Olympics. When he won the gold medal in Pyeongchang, his parents, wife and one of his children were in the crowd. These Games, he is FaceTiming his family from 14 time zones away, while they organize watch parties and special school events to stay connected the best way they can.

“I’ve been fortunate to have them with me at four Olympics,” Shuster said. “This is a chance for them to be at home and experience the Olympics with a lot of friends and family that have never come to the Olympics with us.

“They’re getting a chance to see that other side,” he said. “It’s not better, for sure. But it’s not really feeling any worse, either.”

Olympic Websites Scrub Conflicting Citizenship Info on China’s Star Winter Athlete

Washington — 

The mystery surrounding the citizenship of U.S.-born Chinese Olympic team star Eileen Gu has deepened, with VOA learning that two Olympic websites scrubbed contradictory information about her status shortly after she won her first gold medal of the Beijing Winter Games.

The 18-year-old freestyle skier fueled speculation about her status during a post-victory news conference Tuesday when she declined to respond directly to several reporters’ questions about whether she remains a U.S. citizen. She had just won gold in the women’s freeski big air event.

The San Francisco native, who was born a U.S. citizen to a Chinese immigrant mother and an American father, switched her sporting allegiance from the U.S. to China in 2019, making the announcement on Instagram But the manner in which she made the switch has remained unclear.

Under Rule 41 of the Olympic Charter, Gu must be a Chinese national in order to compete for China. But for a person to successfully naturalize as a Chinese citizen, Article 8 of China’s Nationality Law says that person “shall not retain foreign nationality.”

U.S. authorities have not commented on whether Gu has renounced her U.S. citizenship, a decision they typically treat as a private matter.

Gold medalist Eileen Gu of China celebrates during the medal ceremony for the women’s freestyle skiing big air at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Feb. 8, 2022, in Beijing.

In recent days, the lack of clarity about Gu’s loyalties has been a hot topic for social media users in the U.S. and China, two global powers navigating an increasingly tense relationship.

Many of those commentators did not appear to have noticed that the website of the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Winter Games, Beijing2020.cn, had an English-language profile page for Gu with a biographical section containing the following sentence: “After her first World Cup win in Italy in 2019, she renounced her United States citizenship for Chinese citizenship in order to represent China at the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games.” British news site Independent first reported that information about her profile page on February 2.

The reference to Gu renouncing her U.S. citizenship remained on her profile page when VOA reviewed it on Wednesday, indicating that it had been online for at least a week.

Eileen Gu profile screenshot, Feb. 9, 2022.

When VOA reviewed the same page on Thursday, the sentence had been rewritten to say: “After her first World Cup win in Italy in 2019, she made the decision to compete for China.”

Eileen Gu profile screenshot, Feb. 10, 2022.

Also removed from the updated version of her profile was a quote that she gave to her Austrian sponsor Red Bull in December and that she has since repeated in various forms, including at Tuesday’s news conference: “When I’m in America, I’m American. When I’m in China, I’m Chinese.”

The Mandarin version of Gu’s profile on the Beijing Organizing Committee’s website contains only her basic personal, event and schedule information without any of the lengthy background details of the English version.

Also apparently overlooked by many social media users was a contradictory piece of information about Gu’s citizenship that had been on the International Olympic Committee’s website, Olympics.com, in the opening days of the Beijing Games.

In a report published Wednesday, the Taiwan News site noted that an Olympics.com article titled “Five things you didn’t know about Eileen Gu” ended with a sentence referring to Gu as having “dual nationality.”

That sentence disappeared from the article on Thursday, according to a cached view of it from that date as seen by VOA. An earlier cached view of the article reviewed by VOA shows that the sentence was visible online going back to at least February 5.

Eileen Gu profile screenshot, Feb. 5, 2022.

Eileen Gu profile screenshot, Feb. 10, 2022.

VOA emailed the Beijing Organizing Committee and the International Olympic Committee early Friday asking why the details about Gu’s citizenship were scrubbed from their respective websites sometime Wednesday or Thursday. No immediate responses were received.

VOA also messaged Gu on Instagram and emailed the management companies evolution management + marketing and IMG, which represent her sporting and fashion activities respectively for comment, without response.

Susan Brownell, an American research specialist on Chinese sports and an anthropology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told VOA that she does not believe that either of the scrubbed statements about Gu, regarding renouncing her U.S. citizenship and having dual nationality, is more definitive than the other.

Speaking in a Friday interview, Brownell also said she believes there are two main reasons for the silence on citizenship questions from China’s Olympic organizers, Gu and many of the other 29 foreign-born and foreign-raised athletes on the Chinese Winter Games team.

China has never before fielded so many foreign-born or foreign-raised athletes on an Olympic team for either the Summer or Winter Games. It recruited the 30 athletes with foreign ties to its current Olympic team, 28 of them ice hockey players, to try to improve its relatively weak performance in winter sports as it hosts the Winter Games for the first time.

“After the Beijing Games, they’re going to assess public opinion about having those athletes in the team: Was it good for Chinese sports, patriotism and the government’s image, or was there a negative nationalist backlash?” Brownell said. “It’s a politically sensitive matter that they would want to keep a lid on at this point,” she added.

Brownell said China also is wary of publicly declaring that it may have granted Gu or any of the other foreign-born and foreign-raised athletes rare exceptions to its nationality law to enable them to naturalize as Chinese citizens without giving up their dual nationalities.

“You’ve got hundreds of thousands of people in China that really want dual citizenship. If you give it to athletes, the other people immediately are going to start saying, ‘What about me?’ I think that’s why you have the silence,” she said.

Lin Yang and Adrianna Zhang of VOA’s Mandarin service contributed to this story.

Politics Keep Oozing Into Olympic Limelight in China

San Francisco — 

Despite its repeated insistence that other countries keep politics out of the 2022 Winter Olympics, host country China is using the quadrennial sports showcase to promote its own political messages in subtle ways, observers say.

As examples they cite the selection of a soldier who was injured fighting Indian troops as an Olympic torch bearer, and the appearance of a member of the nation’s beleaguered Uyghur minority in a pre-Games cauldron lighting ceremony.

Analysts point to shifts in geopolitics since Beijing hosted the country’s first Olympics in the summer of 2008. Chinese relations with Western countries such as the United States were closer that year than now, while COVID-19 was more than a decade away from making its first appearance — in China. Chinese control over Hong Kong, its touchy relationship with Australia and flyovers near Taiwan had also not hit their current-day fervor.

“Politics are inevitably involved when athletes compete wearing their national flags,” said Leif-Eric Easley, an associate professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. “But because of China’s human rights issues, aggressive foreign policies and the COVID-19 pandemic, an atmosphere of distrust surrounds the Beijing Winter Games.”

Chinese officials reject the idea the country has introduced politics into the Games.

The Beijing Winter Olympics are “a grand gathering of global winter sports athletes and fans, rather than a platform for certain politicians’ political stunts,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian said in December.

India, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, global Muslims

Nevertheless, when Indian officials spotted the appearance of a People’s Liberation Army regiment commander, Qi Fabao, bearing an Olympic torch earlier this month, they announced that New Delhi would not send officials to the February 4-20 event. Qi’s head was injured as he fought Indian soldiers in the deadly 2020 Galwan Valley clash with China over a disputed border

And one of two Chinese athletes who joined a pre-Games cauldron lighting ceremony was cross-country skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang, who is ethnically Uyghur. Western governments and human rights groups believe China is repressing the political and religious freedoms of other Uyghurs, a largely Muslim group in the country’s Xinjiang region.

China’s handling of Uyghurs resonated with Malaysians, who are also predominantly Muslim. From 2017 into 2019, Uyghurs living in the Southeast Asian country brought the issue to the public’s attention, said Ibrahim Suffian, program director with the polling group Merdeka Center in Kuala Lumpur.

Now, even though Malaysia sent two alpine skiers to the Beijing Games this month, many Malays there aren’t watching the Games on television, he said. Ethnic Chinese Malaysians are more likely to watch as they like seeing China play host.

“I would imagine people who are watching China would feel it’s politicized, but the Malaysian public is divided,” Suffian said.

There has also been an outcry in South Korea over what some say is China’s “appropriation” of Korean culture, Easley said.

The appearance of a woman wearing hanbok, a traditional Korean dress, as one of China’s ethnic minority groups at the opening ceremony angered people in South Korea who took the display as a Chinese claim to a part of Korean culture.

“Already there has been controversy over the use of hanbok traditional dress at the opening ceremony … and whether Seoul should have joined other U.S. allies in a diplomatic boycott,” Easley said.

In another hint of politics, one state-run China Central TV announcer called the Taiwanese Olympic team “China, Taipei” rather than by its official label, Chinese Taipei, CNN reported. China claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan and its officials prefer names that link the island to their country.

Diplomatic boycotts and diplomatic meetings

In the two months before Beijing’s Games, 15 countries including the U.S. declared “diplomatic boycotts” of the event, saying government officials would not attend the Games, often citing human rights issues in China.

Following the U.S. diplomatic boycott, Zhao, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said, “The Winter Olympics is not a stage for political posturing and manipulation.”

However, diplomatic meetings and political discourse have been taking place at the Beijing Games.

China and Russia issued a statement hours before the Games opened opposing the expansion of the Western military alliance NATO. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was visiting Beijing at the time, says Western powers have broken promises about expanding the formerly anti-Soviet alliance, and his country has massed troops near its border with Ukraine.

The two old allies asked NATO to “abandon its ideologized Cold War approaches.”

And Chinese leadership invited Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan to the opening ceremonies, where the two sides signed or concluded a number of agreements in areas ranging from infrastructure and space to sports and culture.

Bond between sports, politics?

Chinese officials associate the development of elite sports to their status as a rising power, according to a 2017 Hong Kong Baptist University study. China’s history of equating sports with its national image has primed Olympics observers overseas to watch for signs of politics in the Games, said Mark Thomas, managing director of the U.K.-based, China-event-focused S2M Group sports consultancy.

“China and politics and sports are one and the same thing, and I think that in many ways there are problems,” Thomas said. “That’s one of the reasons maybe why certain commentators in the West see China’s use of sports as just a tool for statecraft in terms of positioning itself as a growing, emerging and eventually dominant power in the world.”

The rise of China since the 2008 Games has some foreign countries hoping this year’s Olympics somehow “fail,” said Yun Sun, co-director of the East Asia program at the Stimson Center in Washington. China has become more “irritating” in response, she said.

“Domestically, the Chinese are trying to manipulate this event into a patriotism-boosting ceremony, but that inevitably gets into the sticky question of China’s relationships with the countries that it has had problems with,” Sun said.

American Shiffrin Shaken by 'Letdown' of 2 Exits in 2 Olympic Races

The first question posed to Mikaela Shiffrin as she met with reporters after her second consecutive quick exit from an Alpine skiing race at the Beijing Games was short, simple and to the point: What happened?

The complicated, thought-out, talked-out answers that followed entailed little analysis of her actual performance on skis — which lasted all of five seconds before things went awry in Wednesday’s first run of the two-leg slalom, about half as long as the American stayed on course in Monday’s first run of the two-leg giant slalom — and, in the end, boiled down to this: Shiffrin herself was not exactly sure what brought her to this point or where she goes from here.

“I’ve never been in this position before,” the two-time Olympic gold medalist said, tears dampening her cheeks, “and I don’t know how to handle it.”

What the shaken Shiffrin was certain of: “It feels like a really big letdown.”

The 26-year-old from Colorado, who won the slalom at the 2014 Sochi Games and the giant slalom at the 2018 Pyeonchgang Games, was the seventh racer out of the starting hut Wednesday on a course set by her coach, Mike Day.

She began losing her balance and teetering out of control just four seconds and four gates in, swerving too far as she veered to her right. The neon yellow handle of her right ski pole scraped along the snow as she ended up way wide of the fifth gate.

Mikaela Shiffrin, of the United States skis out in the first run of the women’s slalom at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Feb. 9, 2022.

Shiffrin went over to the side of the course, clicked out of her skis and plopped herself down on the ground, shaking her head, then resting it on her arms atop her bent knees. That will be the lasting image of this day — back in the U.S., NBC’s coverage lingered on that shot of Shiffrin, drawing anger on social media from some viewers — and, perhaps, of these Olympics for someone who arrived in China as one of the biggest stars of any Winter Games sport.

“GS and slalom, those were my biggest focuses,” she said. “So it really feels like a lot of work for nothing.”

Other racers said the top was not particularly slippery or difficult. Indeed, reigning slalom world champion Katharina Liensberger of Austria — who took the silver behind Wednesday’s gold medalist Petra Vlhova of Slovakia — called it “a really easy course.”

Vlhova, Shiffrin’s top World Cup rival this season, soared from eighth place after the opening run to the victory with a combined time of 1 minute, 44.98 seconds. She claimed Slovakia’s first Olympic Alpine medal ever.

In the closest Shiffrin came to offering an explanation for what went awry, she said was trying to attack too much.

“I was pushing,” she said, “and maybe it was past my limit.”

Shiffrin arrived with plans to enter all five individual races at the Yanqing Alpine Skiing Center, and another gold would make her only the second woman to win at least one from Alpine at three Olympics in a row.

So far, though, Shiffrin is 0 for 2.

It is not stunning that she hasn’t won a medal, let alone a gold this week. As Shiffrin so often reminds everyone, anything can happen on any given day. What is truly surprising is that she has been so off her game, so immediately, in each of her two trips along the course known as the Ice River.

Mikaela Shiffrin of United States loses control and skis off course during the first run of the women’s giant slalom at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Feb. 7, 2022.

“It’s really sad. It’s never fun to go out,” said Swedish skier Anna Swenn Larsson, 11th in the first run. “I know the feeling.”

Shiffrin’s next opportunity to compete could come Friday in the super-G, although she made it sound as if she might consider skipping that one, saying: “It would be a pleasure to ski. But I also have some teammates who are really fast, and we have the athletes who can fill the spaces. So if I’m going to ski out on the fifth gate, like, what’s the point?”

She never has competed in a super-G at an Olympics but did win it at the 2019 world championships.

What also is noteworthy about all of this is that Shiffrin is known for being so consistently sound on the slopes, like a metronome that never misses a beat. She might be slower than other athletes on a given day, sure — no one is perfect — but what she so rarely does is flub a maneuver in such a manner as to not even make it all the way down the hill. The “Did Not Finish” on Monday was her first in a giant slalom since Jan. 23, 2018.

Her 47 career World Cup wins in the slalom are more than anyone else has won in any single event.

“My entire career has taught me to trust in my skiing if it’s good skiing and that’s all that I have to rely on. … Of course the pressure is high, but that didn’t feel like the biggest issue today,” she said. “So it’s not the end of the world, and it’s so stupid to care this much, but I feel that I have to question a lot now.”

Shiffrin has shared much about her innermost thoughts over the past several months, via social media and traditional media. She discussed the ways in which she empathized when athletes at the Tokyo Olympics such as gymnast Simone Biles and swimmer Caeleb Dressel shared their feelings about pressure and expectations.

And Shiffrin has been open about the difficult task of carrying on after the accidental death of her father, Jeff, in February 2020.

“Right now, I would really like to call him, so that doesn’t make it easier,” Shiffrin said Monday, pausing between words, her voice shaking.

Then, with a laugh, she continued: “And he would probably tell me to just get over it. But he’s not here to say that. So on top of everything else, I’m pretty angry at him, too.”

Swiss Beat Feuz, new downhill Olympic champion | sports

The Swiss Beat Feuz was proclaimed Olympic downhill champion by winning the queen event of alpine skiing at the Beijing 2022 Games on Monday, which was held on the demanding Yanqing track, in which Frenchman Johan Clarey captured the silver medal – with 41 years – and the Austrian Matthias Mayer, the bronze.

Feuz, 34, winner of the last four editions of the World Cup of the discipline and world champion in front of his fans in St. Moritz 2017, covered the 3,152 meters of the colorful ‘Rock’ track -starting at 2,179 meters of altitude and a drop of 894- in one minute, 42 seconds and 69 hundredths, one tenth less than Clarey, who, at 41, became the oldest Olympic medalist in alpine skiing history.

Olympic Teams Raise Concerns Over Quarantine Hotels

BEIJING — 

Not enough food. Inedible meals. No training equipment. Some Olympic athletes unlucky enough to test positive for the coronavirus at the Beijing Olympics feel their quarantine conditions are making a bad situation much worse.

“My stomach hurts, I’m very pale and I have huge black circles around my eyes. I want all this to end. I cry every day. I’m very tired,” Russian biathlon competitor Valeria Vasnetsova posted on Instagram from one of Beijing’s so-called quarantine hotels.

Her problem wasn’t with any symptoms of the virus. It was the food.

Vasnetsova posted a picture Thursday of what she said was “breakfast, lunch and dinner for five days already” — a tray with food including plain pasta, an orange sauce, charred meat on a bone, a few potatoes and no greens.

She said she mostly survived on a few pieces of pasta because it was “impossible” to eat the rest, “but today I ate all the fat they serve instead of meat because I was very hungry.” She added she lost a lot of weight and “my bones are already sticking out.”

The quarantine hotels are increasingly the target of criticism from athletes and their teams, who are lobbying organizers for improvements. There’s a lack of transparency, too, with only some virus-positive athletes forced into quarantine hotels where their teams don’t have access, while teammates in similar situations are allowed to isolate within the Olympic village.

The rules for athletes who test positive say those without symptoms go to a dedicated hotel for isolation. Anyone who has COVID-19 with symptoms will go to a hospital. In both cases, they’ll be unable to compete until cleared for discharge.

Teams have started going public with criticism.

Canada’s Darcy Sharpe competes during the men’s slopestyle qualifying at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Feb. 6, 2022, in Zhangjiakou, China.

After Eric Frenzel, a three-time gold medalist in Nordic combined, tested positive, German delegation head Dirk Schimmelpfennig lambasted the “unreasonable” living conditions. Germany wants larger, more hygienic rooms, and more regular food deliveries so athletes who are eventually released are still fit to compete, Schimmelpfennig said in comments reported by the FAZ newspaper.

The pressure can pay off. Belgian skeleton racer Kim Meylemans was brought back from a quarantine hotel to isolation in the athletes’ village after she made a tearful post on social media. Her main gripe was the lack of information. She was loaded into an ambulance and transported from one quarantine facility to another on a day she thought she was being released.

Vasnetsova passed her time in quarantine with a little detective work. When fetching the food left outside her door, she took a glance at the boxes left outside other rooms in her corridor, whose doors were labeled with signs to distinguish Olympians from other people working at the Games who tested positive, such as team staff.

She concluded the athletes were getting worse food and underlined it with a picture of food served to her team doctor, who had also tested positive and was living two floors below. He had fresh fruit, a salad and prawns with broccoli.

“I honestly don’t understand, why is there this attitude to us, the athletes?!” she wrote.

Two days on from her criticism, Vasnetsova is still in quarantine, but things are looking up.

Russian biathlon team spokesperson Sergei Averyanov posted a picture of what he said was an improved meal delivered to Vasnetsova’s room including salmon, cucumbers, sausages and yogurt. A stationary bike will be delivered soon, he added.

Vasnetsova, he wrote, “is already smiling, and that’s the main thing.”

The Dutch Schouten, gold and Olympic record in speed skating 3,000 m. | sports

The Dutch Irene Schouten won gold today in the 3,000-meter speed skating event at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games with a mark that also helped her break the Olympic record.

Schouten, with 3 minutes, 56 seconds and 86 tenths, surpassed the mark set by German Claudia Pechstein (3:57.70), unbeaten since the 2002 Salt Lake City Games.

Olympic Opening Ceremony Set for Friday

China officially kicks off the 2022 Winter Olympic Games with the opening ceremony Friday at Beijing’s iconic National Stadium, also known as The Bird’s Nest, the site of the ceremonies for the 2008 Summer Games.

Friday’s opening ceremony is scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. (1200 UTC) and will be attended by President Xi Jinping, who will announce the official opening of the Games.

Xi will be joined by dignitaries including Russian leader Vladimir Putin, World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. But several countries, including the United States, Britain and Canada, are staging a diplomatic boycott of the Games to protest what they say is the genocide of some 1 million Muslim Uyghurs in China’s far western Xinjiang province.

Beijing officials have rejected the allegations of human rights abuses.

India is the latest to join the boycott. New Delhi’s announcement came after China included in an Olympic torch relay ahead of Friday’s opening a soldier who was involved in a deadly 2020 border clash with Indian troops. The participation of the soldier, Qi Fabao, was reported by the Chinese media.

German slider Natalie Geisenberger said she had considered boycotting but decided against it. “We athletes have absolutely nothing to do with the decision to award the Olympic Games to Beijing — the (IOC) decides, and we athletes are presented with a fait accompli,” she said.

This year’s Games come amid a number of COVID-19-related restrictions imposed on the nearly 3,000 athletes, and the public. Tickets were not sold to the general public because of health concerns and even though some spectators will be present at the ceremonies the number of attendees is unclear.

The athletes will not have the opportunity to explore China outside the Olympic gates. They and the thousands of Olympic Village support personnel, press and volunteers have been restricted to designated venues, cutting them off from the rest of China during the competition. Officials say at least 290 COVID-19 cases have already emerged in the “bubble.”

Meanwhile, some countries have advised their athletes to not bring their cellphones and laptops to China because of cybersecurity concerns. The FBI said earlier this week that China’s hacking operations are “more brazen” than ever before.

The staging of the Olympics in China coincides with worldwide concerns about the safety of China’s star tennis player Peng Shuai after she said a high-ranking Chinese government official had sexually assaulted her.

The International Olympic Committee, however, said they have met with her and will meet with her during the Games.

Chinese Americans Support Olympic Athletes, Not Necessarily Host Country

SAN FRANCISCO — 

Anthony Shiu was born in San Francisco. His father’s parents are from China. Several generations may separate him from China, but the 60-year-old transit mechanic spends his free time as an activist against anti-Asian hate crimes and helping to run a lion dance troupe. Lion dances are a facet of traditional Chinese culture.

In that spirit, he backs Beijing as the 2022 Winter Olympics host city despite a litany of Sino-U.S. political issues that culminated last month in Washington’s decision to boycott the Games diplomatically. He plans to watch the world sporting event on TV if time allows.

“To me, Beijing is just a hosting country, and the committee said, ‘We’re going to hold it here,’ so where they hold it is not important to me,” Shiu told VOA during an interview in Portsmouth Square park at the core of San Francisco’s historic Chinatown.

Shiu’s ideas about the Beijing Winter Olympics reflect those of many fellow Chinese Americans: China has the right to hold the Olympics despite Western condemnations of the country over human rights problems. Still, there’s a faction that would prefer Beijing not host the Games.

“It’s a sport,” said 38-year-old Vincent Fung, a Chinese American operator of the Buddha Exquisite Corp. paper goods store in Chinatown. “People should respect (that), it doesn’t matter what race. That’s what the Olympics stands for. So, if you’re boycotting things, that defeats the purpose of having the game. That’s my view on it.”

Chinese American Sherwin Won, 69, a retired university clinical lab scientist from San Francisco, skis and plans to watch the Olympics. He even hopes to visit Beijing someday, post-COVID-19. “The team members have nothing to do with China,” Won said of participating foreign athletes. “It’s their sports.”

Human rights groups gather to call for a boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics 2022, in Taipei, Jan. 26, 2022.

Tension over Taiwan, Hong Kong, Uyghurs

Supporters of diplomatic boycotts in multiple Western countries have called out Beijing over perceived strong-arm tactics toward Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Critics, including politicians in the U.S., EU and human rights organizations, also find fault with China for its treatment of the largely Muslim Uyghur population in the Chinese Xinjiang region, including sending more than 1 million Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic minorities to internment camps.

China has denied these accusations, saying the camps are vocational training centers to help alleviate poverty and fight extremism.

In the United States, White House press secretary Jen Psaki last month said the administration would avoid sending officials to the Games — the diplomatic boycott — due to “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses.”

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said, “The United States should stop politicizing sports, and stop disrupting and undermining the Beijing Winter Olympics, lest it should affect bilateral dialogue and cooperation in important areas and international and regional issues,” according to Chinese state media Xinhua.

Hot and cold Sino-U.S. history

Sino-U.S. ties blossomed in the 1970s after then-U.S. President Richard Nixon’s historic meeting with Communist leader Mao Zedong. The same decade saw a wave of immigration from southern China to American cities such as San Francisco, mostly to earn money and join relatives who were already in the country.

About 5 million Chinese Americans live in the United States today, census data show.

A man walks past installations of Bing Dwen Dwen,left, and Shuey Rhon Rhon, mascots of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics Games, along a street in Beijing on Jan. 28, 2022.

Relations have slipped since 2017 over trade friction, consular spats and technology transfer issues. The two superpowers have jousted too over the autonomy of Taiwan, with Beijing calling it a Chinese territory and Washington offering to defend it, and crackdowns against antigovernment protesters in Chinese-ruled Hong Kong.

Some Chinese Americans often feel distant from human rights causes, and as ethnic Han people — China’s vast racial majority — are not “sympathetic to the Uyghurs,” said Yun Sun, co-director of the East Asia program at the Stimson Center in Washington.

“Second, the boycott apparently makes bilateral relations more difficult, and it is even harder for Chinese Americans to travel back to China,” Sun added.

Sporting concerns

Justine Chen, 38, a Nashville, Tennessee-based communications director of Taiwanese American ancestry, says Beijing qualifies more as a showroom for the government than as an elite venue for athletes.

“I don’t think they should have won the bid in the first place. Not just because of their human rights record but because I don’t think they provide the best experience for athletes nor spectators,” she said. “It’s all a big show so the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) can pretend it has its affairs together when it really doesn’t.”

Chen attended the Beijing Summer Games of 2008 and the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Sydney offered better venues, she said.

“I think as a minority in America that has seen a huge amount of hate and violence over the past two years against people who look like me, I wish I could have more pride in an Asian country hosting such a large event that’s supposed to unify people of all kinds, including those participating in the Paralympics,” Chen said.

Human rights concerns

Many people of Asian ancestry in Southern California oppose China’s acts in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, said Ken Wu, Taiwanese American vice president of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs Los Angeles chapter. His Washington, D.C.-based group lobbies Congress for pro-Taiwan legislation.

They support diplomatic boycotts but also a guarantee that athletes can attend the Beijing Olympics as a reward for their practice, he said.

“Right now, I think the whole advocacy community and the whole human rights community are kind of agreeing on that’s the direction we should go,” Wu said. “We should continue to pressure the states to exercise the diplomatic boycott and also hopefully we can get the businesses not to sponsor, but let’s put our support behind our athletes.”

While Chinese Americans differ on their views of China as the host city of the Winter Olympics, they all stand behind the athletes who have worked to qualify for a spot in what has become a contentious world competition.