Athletes, journalists struggle with COVID-19 protocols at Beijing Olympics

The COVID-19 protocols at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing were expected to be stringent. Just a few days into the Games, those protocols have already made headlines.

Monday’s women’s hockey game between Canada and the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) was delayed by over an hour as officials waited on test results for the Russian team. In order to get the game to start, both teams agreed to wear masks, making the game the first Olympic women’s hockey game to require all players to do so. The Russians eventually took off theirs for the start of the third period after the tests revealed no additional positive results.

“It’s not enough oxygen,” Russian forward Alexandra Vafina said. “So for us in the first period was pretty hard, but we adjusted to that.” Canada ended up winning the game 6-1.

The hockey players weren’t the only ones to run into issues related to the COVID-19 protocols at the Beijing Olympics. Belgian skeleton athlete Kim Meylemans went viral for an emotional video she posted on Instagram last week. She had tested positive for COVID-19 after arriving in Beijing. After returning several negative tests, Meylemans thought she was going to the Olympic village. However, she was taken to another hotel serving as an isolation facility instead.

“Obviously this is very hard for me,” Mylemans said in the video. “So I ask for you all to give me some time to consider my next steps, because I’m not sure I can handle 14 more days in the Olympic competition while being in this isolation.”

International Olympic Committee officials convened after the video was posted, and Mylemsans was back on the ice training Monday. She will continue to be tested twice a day, and she is still not cleared to return to the Olympic village until later this week.

It’s not just the athletes who have to deal with the COVID-19 protocols in Beijing. A Swedish journalist who was taken to isolation has begun releasing columns for the newspaper he works for.

“It was a really terrifying experience and it just felt like… it didn’t feel real. It felt like as if I was in a movie, a sci-fi movie or something,” Philip Gadd told Reuters in a Zoom interview from his quarantine hotel. “It was really hard to understand that everything happened to me. I was really far away from home. I’m from Sweden, so I have travelled all the way to China and I was just by myself, nobody to speak to, in an ambulance.