He called their organization "extraordinary" and credited the Chinese and their organizing committee for serving them up "in such an excellent way and a safe way."īy many mechanical measures, these Games were a success. "We welcome China as a winter sport country," Bach said, closing the Games. It felt somewhat incongruous - a show bursting with colour and energy and enthusiasm and even joy, the very things that couldn't assert themselves inside China's COVID bubble. Unlike the first pandemic Olympics in Tokyo last summer, which featured all but empty seats at the opening and closing, a modest but energetic crowd populated the seats of Beijing's "Bird's Nest" stadium. "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" kicked off a notably Western-flavored show with Chinese characteristics as dancers with tiny, fiery snowflakes glided across the stadium in a ceremony that, like the opening, was headed by Chinese director Zhang Yimou. On Sunday night, Xi and International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach stood together as Beijing handed off to Milan-Cortina, site of the 2026 Winter Games. And it was sequestered in a "bubble" that kept participants and the city around them - and, by extension, the sporadically watching world - at arm's length. It was controlled and calibrated in ways only Xi Jinping's China could pull off. It was messy and, at the same time, somehow sterile. The terrarium of a Winter Games that has been Beijing 2022 came to its end Sunday, capping an unprecedented Asian Olympic trifecta and sending the planet's most global sporting event off to the West for the foreseeable future, with no chance of returning to this corner of the world until at least 2030. All inside an anti-COVID "closed loop" enforced by China's authoritarian government. The end of the Olympic line for the world's most renowned snowboarder. An ace American skier who faltered and went home empty-handed.
A new Chinese champion - from California. A pile of figure-skating rubble created by Russian misbehaviour.
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