Beijing’s Olympic Village was officially opened on Thursday. Basically, however, it remains hermetically sealed so that the athletes don’t spread the virus among the people.
Foto: imago images / Kyodo News
How far are athletes willing to go for their dream of the Olympics? The Corona Winter Games in Beijing in times of the omicron wave are completely redefining the borders. “We’ve reduced contacts for two years, but now it’s tightened up once more. As an athlete, you no longer have any social contacts. The tactic is: don’t see anyone,” says German cross-country hopeful Katharina Hennig. The time for radical self-quarantine is regarding a week before the Olympics to minimize the risk of infection, which has increased once more.
According to national ski jumping coach Stefan Horngacher, that means: “Shielding everyone, including families.” So it’s off to the athletes’ monastery, even “separated from your partner” (cross-country skiing head coach Peter Schlickenrieder). When friends stopped by at home for a coffee and wished them luck for the Olympics, says Jonas Dobler, »I had to cancel. That was bizarre,” said the cross-country skier.
In the meantime, he has long since arrived at the shielded preparatory training camp in Davos, Switzerland. Everyone in the bubble here is subject to a rigorous testing regime. The hotel has its own dining room and even special staircases in the rooms only for the German team. You usually only have direct proximity to one teammate. Otherwise, the only thing left for contact with the outside world is the mobile phone, which Katharina Hennig describes as the »most important utensil« in her life at the moment.
Nobody knows exactly whether this quarantine madness will bring anything in the end. After all, there is still a residual risk, especially when traveling to China in a full plane for the Olympics. Especially since following arrival there, stricter rules apply to when a corona test is classified as positive. The Olympic organizers have lowered the controversial CT value (Cycle Threshold) for a positive test from 40 to below 35. But there is still a difference to Germany: According to the Robert Koch Institute, there is only a positive result if the CT value is less than 30. The lower this value, the more contagious a person is.
So it can happen that you board a plane in Germany and test negative, but arrive positive in China. During their test races on the Olympic track at the beginning of winter, the German lugers experienced what happens next. “We were in isolation in China because someone on the plane tested positive on arrival, although everyone was still negative on departure. We were then able to train under total isolation, but were otherwise isolated,” says world champion Julia Taubitz and reports on the procedure: “There was a corona test every evening at 11 p.m. and at 5 in the morning. Just when you finally fell asleep following jet lag, you were woken up once more in the morning. The food was placed in plastic bags in front of the door and was mostly cold.« Another annoyance: After falls, there was a lack of quick medical help on the track because the Chinese helpers didn’t want to touch anyone for fear of infection.
In any case, the newly crowned overall World Cup winner Taubitz will “be more nervous before every corona test than before the actual race,” she predicts. Also because many German coaches and athletes have now expressed fear of manipulated corona tests. The discussion initiated by the German Alpine Sports Director Wolfgang Maier (“You can pull anyone out of circulation who somehow stands in your way”) is now causing headaches for the three-time Olympic luge champion Felix Loch: “We mightn’t have imagined beforehand what the Olympics would be like 2014 in Sochi in relation to doping tests. And now there’s a much easier way to get someone off the hook. Compared to doping tests, the corona smears are very easy to manipulate. And then you’re just out,” Loch fears. In luge, the veteran estimates the danger to be relatively low due to the lack of competitive Chinese athletes, but in bobsleigh and skeleton it would look different. The danger might be even greater, for example, in politically prestigious figure skating, where archenemy USA is in direct competition with the hopes of host China.
The German cross-country skiing boss Schlickenrieder, on the other hand, cannot imagine that the hosts are faking mass corona tests: “We will experience very correct processes. I rather believe that the Chinese want to take over the title of world champion in organization from Germany. After all, masks and tests are a huge market for China.« According to Schlickenrieder, the danger that there might still be many positive test results at the Olympics is very real because of Omikron and the many people in the Olympic Village. He is therefore not aiming for the first German Olympic medal in cross-country skiing in eight years, but something completely different: “The games are already a success if a large number of the nominated athletes are at the start.”
Participation is suddenly everything once more. The almost forgotten Olympic motto is experiencing a sad renaissance amid the madness surrounding the pandemic.
