She belongs to an ethnic minority at the heart of the disputes between China and the West: the Uyghur sportswoman Dinigeer Yilamujiang lit the Olympic cauldron of the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, a deliberate choice of the Chinese regime.
While sports stars are usually chosen for this symbolic gesture, the cross-country skier, unknown to the general public, was chosen on Friday evening to conclude the opening ceremony of the 2022 Olympics.
Under the gaze of President Xi Jinping and millions of viewers, the 20-year-old skier, all smiles, was the last bearer of the flame with her compatriot Zhao Jiawen.
Together, they placed the torch on a structure representing a giant snowflake which rose above the Olympic stadium in Beijing, the famous “Bird’s Nest”. It will burn there until the closing ceremony on February 20.
This gesture appears as a snub to Western countries, led by the United States, who have chosen to diplomatically boycott the Beijing Olympics, citing human rights violations in Xinjiang (north-west), a region where the Muslim Uyghur ethnicity is the majority.
Asked at a press conference, International Olympic Committee (IOC) spokesman Mark Adams did not mention Dinigeer Yilamujiang’s ethnicity, simply remarking that “as a qualified athlete for the Games, she had the right to be there wherever she came from, whatever her background”.
Commenting on how the ceremony would go, he added that it was “a lovely idea.”
Lie of the century
Washington evokes a “genocide” in Xinjiang, following reports of forced sterilizations of Uyghurs.
The communist regime denies this accusation as well as the one according to which it would have interned more than a million Uighurs in political re-education camps and subjected them to forced labor.
Beijing says these camps are “vocational training centers” meant to steer “trainees” away from Islamist radicalization.
Xinjiang has been hit in the past by attacks attributed to separatists or Uyghur Islamists and is subject to draconian surveillance.
The Chinese regime calls Western accusations the “lie of the century” and its media strives to portray the region and community relations in a good light.
In this context, the Chinese media underlined the ethnic origin of Dinigeer Yilamujiang on Saturday, and diplomats broadcast on Twitter, a social network blocked in China, a video of her family moved to tears when the young woman lights the Olympic cauldron.
“Cover in Glory”
Daughter of a ski instructor, she finished 43rd in the skiathlon, her first Olympic event on Saturday, just hours after the opening ceremony.
“The only thing we can do is train hard and cover ourselves with glory for the country,” she recently promised in a report devoted to Xinjiang athletes participating in the Beijing Olympics.
A member of the national cross-country team since 2017, she has spent the past three years in Norway training for the Games.
In 2019, she became the first Chinese cross-country skier to reach the podium in a competition organized under the aegis of the FIS, the International Ski Federation.
Last year, she placed 13th in the team sprint event at the World Championships, and 41st in the 10 km.
Dinigeer Yilamujiang hails from Altay in northern Xinjiang, a mountainous region where China claims the invention of skiing. The Chinese media have been praising this winter sports destination in recent weeks.
Besides the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom are among the countries that have refused to send political figures to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Games. But their athletes participate well in competitions.