Thread by @thetimes

Inside the #Beijing2022WinterOlympics – fake snow, hazmat suits and robot bartenders

📍 Sports journalist @owenslot reports from Beijing

thetimes.co.uk/article/inside…

Just as we had been informed, people in hazmat suits were there to greet us. A small army of them, head to toe in the full plastic and goggles – you step off the plane and there they are. Welcome to Beijing.

✍️ @owenslot

There are medals to be cherished here at this most extraordinary of #WinterOlympics, there will be glory to be celebrated that for many athletes will be like no other in their professional lives

🗣 @owenslot: For me, though, a journalist sent to cover the Games, the highlight of the year has been getting through Beijing airport without being turned away. Achievements do not come much greater

When you arrive here for the Olympics, you commit to the next two and a half weeks in “the closed loop” and if you step outside it, you will pretty soon find yourself in a Covid detention centre.

And yes, the authorities will know. They will trace your phone

This is an Olympic Games like no other and if you want to be here, there are rules to follow. A rulebook has been online for you to study (80-plus pages of it). I even know the details required of the face masks that must be worn

This is how it rolls in a nation attempting to pull off a zero-Covid policy and simultaneously stage an Olympic Games.

Only China would contemplate doing it this way. Only China could pull it off, writes @owenslot

⛷ This is the first winter Olympics planned to have 100% man-made show. More than 222 million litres of water have been required for the job

Environmentalists are equally concerned with the fact that one of the mountain ski competition sites has been built from scratch for the occasion and the Songshan National Nature Reserve has been ripped into to allow this to happen

🍹 Meanwhile, behind the bar in the main media centre, there are no bar staff, but you can get a Screwdriver mixed by a robot. There are also robot options in the cafeteria, too, where you can have your dinner delivered from out of the ceiling above your dining station

They can claim to be staging the greenest ever Olympics here, but who can test or trust the detail? There is no getting away from these Games, their hosts and the environment shaped around political containment and virus control

✍️ @owenslot

🗣 @owenslot: It is not in China’s interests to have a spread of Covid. They are, apparently, gold medallists at beating the virus so they do not want it ripping through their big global PR event

So what our Chinese hosts really need is for the sport to begin — which it did today.

There is so much curling that they had to start it two days before the opening ceremony. A crowd of about 200 were allowed to attend

We don’t know how much quarantining they had to do before being allowed in. We do know that they clapped and kept their voices down. And when my face mask slipped, I got kindly reminded to nudge it up above my nose

At least to explain it all, we have the China Daily newspaper with a front page that informs us “How President Xi’s leadership is delivering ‘fantastic, extraordinary and excellent’ Winter Games.”

We shall see... | ✍️ @owenslot

thetimes.co.uk/article/inside…