Some athletes are quickly experiencing an unpleasant reality when it comes to being in Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. Those who have tested positive for the Wuhan coronavirus are sent to quarantine hotels, with James Ellingworth reporting for the Associated Press that teams are raising concerns over "unreasonable" living conditions.
Athletes who test positive are sent to a hotel for isolation, while those who test positive with symptoms are sent to a hospital. They must be cleared in order to compete.
As Reuters reported on Monday, Russian biathlete Valeria Vasnetsova will not be able to quarantine, but instead is quarantining in Beijing hotel.
The experience she describes is quite harrowing. From Ellingworth's report:
“My stomach hurts, I’m very pale and I have huge black circles around my eyes. I want all this to end. I cry every day. I’m very tired,” Russian biathlon competitor Valeria Vasnetsova posted on Instagram from one of Beijing’s so-called quarantine hotels.
Her problem wasn’t with any symptoms of the virus. It was the food.
Vasnetsova posted a picture Thursday of what she said was “breakfast, lunch and dinner for five days already” — a tray with food including plain pasta, an orange sauce, charred meat on a bone, a few potatoes and no greens.
She said she mostly survived on a few pieces of pasta because it was “impossible” to eat the rest, “but today I ate all the fat they serve instead of meat because I was very hungry.” She added she lost a lot of weight and “my bones are already sticking out.”
Vasnetsova, as an athlete, was also being treated worse than others in quarantine:
Vasnetsova passed her time in quarantine with a little detective work. When fetching the food left outside her door, she took a glance at the boxes left outside other rooms in her corridor, whose doors were labeled with signs to distinguish Olympians from other people working at the Games who tested positive, such as team staff.
She concluded the athletes were getting worse food, and underlined it with a picture of food served to her team doctor, who had also tested positive and was living two floors below. He had fresh fruit, a salad and prawns with broccoli.
“I honestly don’t understand, why is there this attitude to us, the athletes?!” she wrote.
Two days on from her criticism, Vasnetsova is still in quarantine but things are looking up.
When it comes to that "attitude," such poor conditions, targeting certain people for those conditions, and a shroud of secrecy are unfortunately nothing new for Communist regimes.
As Ellingworth also reported:
The quarantine hotels are increasingly the target of criticism from athletes and their teams, who are lobbying organizers for improvements. There’s a lack of transparency, too, with only some virus-positive athletes forced into quarantine hotels where their teams don’t have access, while teammates in similar situations are allowed to isolate within the Olympic village.
...
After Eric Frenzel, a three-time gold medalist in Nordic combined, tested positive, German delegation head Dirk Schimmelpfennig lambasted the “unreasonable” living conditions. Germany wants larger, more hygienic rooms, and more regular food deliveries so athletes who are eventually released are still fit to compete, Schimmelpfennig said in comments reported by the FAZ newspaper.
The pressure can pay off. Belgian skeleton racer Kim Meylemans was brought back from a quarantine hotel to isolation in the athletes’ village after she made a tearful post on social media. Her main gripe was the lack of information. She was loaded into an ambulance and transported from one quarantine facility to another on a day she thought she was being released.
Even before such harrowing reports surfaced, there were concerns with the Winter Games being held in Beijing considering the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has committed a whole host of human rights abuses, including genocide against Uyghur Muslims. This year's Winter Olympics have also been dubbed the Genocide Games.
As part of efforts to reduce spreading the virus and telling the world they're achieving "Zero COVID," protocols in place involve robots to also show off, as highlighted in an awe-struck report from Alan Blinder with The New York Times which includes food reviews of the cuisine but fails to make note of concerns of genocide.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member