For three weeks, our reporter Éric Desrosiers and our photographer Marie-France Coallier will share their experience of covering the Beijing Winter Olympics, from the backstage to the competitions.
It’s hard not to be struck by the surreal side of the situation. From the main media center of the Beijing Olympics, you can easily see the National Aquatics Center, the famous “water cube” of the 2008 Summer Games transformed for the occasion into an “ice cube” to hold curling events. It would be enough to walk three blocks to get there. From there, you would literally be next to the Olympic Stadium, or “bird’s nest”. However, to go from one place to another, it is necessary each time to borrow special shuttles whose main function consists in making us pass guard posts which control the entries and the exits of the famous sanitary bubble, or circuit firm (closed-loop), of these Winter Games unlike any other.
Consisting mainly of competition sites and hotels reserved for foreigners coming to the Games, this health bubble is distinct from another bubble, that of athletes, coaches and officials in action, which it never approaches within about two meters. during brief press meetings, for example. Each location is literally surrounded by walls and high metal barriers separating their approximately 70,000 occupants from the entire Chinese population. From the streets of Beijing and its 21 million inhabitants, we only see what we can see from the windows of our buses or the people handpicked to be among the few spectators admitted to the stadiums so that they seem less empty. Masked at all times, outside and inside, we only leave our hotels with proof of having passed a daily COVID test. We go by train to the other two mountain competition areas in special wagons.
The Tokyo Games also had their health bubbles this summer. One difference was that the hotels and competition venues did not look like strongholds. We were instructed not to mingle with the general population, but we could walk from one place to another if they were close enough and we were allowed one outing of about fifteen minutes a day. to smoke or pick up groceries at a nearby grocery store. But above all, we were freed from our health bubble once our two weeks of quarantine were over. In China, foreigners who enter the Olympic bubble will only come out when they leave the country.
Colleagues, who experienced the Olympics before the pandemic, spoke of prison. However, we have rarely seen a prison so large that dozens of hotels, entire stadiums, trains and even mountains can fit there. It would be more accurate to say that China and its Winter Olympics live in two completely parallel worlds and that we will have to come back another time so that the inhabitants of both can meet.
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund.The duty.