International Olympic Committee is complicit in the shambles of Beijing’s hard line on Covid

A news cameraman undergoes a Covid-19 PCR test upon his arrival in Beijing

The International Olympic Committee has been less than forthright when it comes to the Beijing Winter Olympics, which open this Friday night.

In every public utterance, the tone is of effusive praise for China and the Beijing organisers, with little regard for the shambles that is going on behind the scenes.

There is little acknowledgment of being complicit — and even encouraging — of China’s extreme demands on Olympic visitors, which is creating such a layer of stress for the athletes it is almost impossible for them to compete at their best.

IOC president Thomas Bach — a 1976 Olympic fencing champion — has yet to fully acknowledge the increasingly unfair conditions being placed on competitors and the chance lottery of the timing of catching Covid.

Instead he praises the Chinese measures as providing some sort of safe environment, when the conditions on the ground are anything but.

No one is scared of getting the virus, but everyone is highly anxious about the isolation and treatment and being stuck in China if they do get infected.

Let’s just count how many of the 100 IOC members turn up for the event they own. Princess Anne is out, so too Australia’s John Coates, who is undergoing back surgery.

The IOC session, its annual general meeting, has cut its agenda to just one day, with most members tuning in from the comfort of their lounge rooms. It could be that less than 20 per cent of IOC members arrive in China.

One who did turn up, the athletes commission chair Emma Terho, tested positive on Friday in Beijing and she claimed it was proof the countermeasures system was working.

Yet the 72 pages of “playbook” rules that have been approved by the IOC bosses in Lausanne as the highly restricted way of life at these Olympics are protecting not the athletes, but the Olympic coffers and billions in television broadcast fees.

As much as Bach and others claim they are acting in the best interests of competitors to forge ahead with the Games, they cannot pretend that this has been without significant impact on athletes’ mental health and often their future careers and earnings. Why not just postpone the Games for another year?

Instead, just getting on the plane — which has to be a special charter leaving from only a handful of airports around the world — is a day-long exercise in completing and uploading details. Understanding the logistics of the PCR tests and various QR codes is complicated and confusing.

Thousands of competitors, team officials and broadcasters, technicians and journalists are then arriving at Beijing airport, having already had two, and sometimes four negative PCR tests in hand and being subjected to such brutal arrival testing that it is leaving some with bleeding noses.

So far more than 200 Olympic participants have tested positive to Covid-19 while arriving in Beijing and been put into isolation — some for an indeterminate time, others being ruled out of their competitions and unable to do their jobs.

No one can get on a plane back home until they are negative. Those who have been near the positive cases are deemed close contacts and have to undergo PCR tests every 12 hours for a week amid tight restrictions on their movements.

The athletes have been under a month-long nightmare of ducking and weaving from Covid — with compulsory mask-wearing and a complicated system of bubbles, all carried out under the threat of missing their Olympic chance.

Now we are seeing some athletes getting Covid and it’s clear that Omicron has infiltrated the Olympic closed loop in Beijing. On Saturday there were 11 positive cases picked up in the closed loop, three of which were from the Olympic village.

The ability of organisers to restrict the spread of the virus inside the loop with their super-strict mask-wearing, social distancing and fully vaccinated conditions will be seen in the next few days.

The IOC members say that once the competition starts, most people won’t care about what has gone on beforehand or who is missing. Instead the television pictures will show spectacular venues and engaging competition.

But at some stage the Olympic bosses, from Bach down, will have to reconsider their wholehearted indulgence of the strident countermeasures and ponder if it was really worth it?