Winter Olympics in Beijing: the main result is a victory over Omicron

Sergey Levin

First and foremost: there was no world holiday. From the word "generally". Games without tens of thousands of foreign tourists, which create the unique atmosphere of the main international competitions, are like a heavy drinking binge alone.

In the role of a bitter drunkard, hungry for senseless show, was China. It is not at all clear why Beijing needed the Winter Games, if in 2008 the country pompously held the Summer Olympics? Then China presented itself to the world, showing the achievements of the new economic policy. This time there was nothing to show - all the achievements of the past 14 years were behind the glass walls of hopeless "zero tolerance" bubbles. The world did not see the host country of the Games, its people, its features even from television broadcasts - after all, journalists with their cameras were also locked in special facilities under heavy guard.

No tourists - no spectators in the stands. Specially selected by the Chinese KGB and the Ministry of Health extras, who, as it were, performed the role of "fans", coped with their task with a big deuce. There were few of them, and, as a rule, they don’t understand a belmes in winter sports.

Know-how of the Beijing Games - organizers, attendants and volunteers. All - on one, "mask" face. All - like biorobots, performing some pre-established body movements, or simply standing in a stance of indifferent guards. Zero communication. Zero emotion. Zero human ... In a word, a familiar picture of the South Korean TV series "The Squid Game" came out. Unless the athletes were killed during the competition.

However, the Olympians themselves, with the humility of those going to the slaughter for three weeks and more, endured the prison of the Beijing "holiday".

The second factor, and also important: winter sports, as before, remain in the "winter" countries. Only 27 states out of 92 received medals in Beijing. At the same time, those who could claim more - the USA, Belarus, Finland, South Korea, Lithuania, Poland, Kazakhstan ... expensive facilities for winter sports, support teams and coaches in most countries of the world and do not want and cannot.

In Russia, by the way, with the exception of hockey, biathlon and figure skating with skis, there is also a very cool attitude towards ski jumping, and bean and sledding at breathtaking speed, and to all kinds of freestyles and moguls.

But in Russia, during any Olympiad, according to the established Soviet habit, they are still interested in medals and victories. And let the team of the Russian Olympic Committee be the only one of all the participants! - at the Beijing Olympics they performed without a flag and an anthem, but ... Wow! In terms of the number of awards, we have broken the historical records of our own team for all time! Hooray! - patriots rejoice, bashfully averting their eyes from the general 9th place.

Yes, in the Olympic Sochi in 2014 they won 30 medals, and in Calgary in 1988 - 29. And now - 32!

It just came out, like a fly in the ointment in a barrel of honey, one vile detail.

At the Olympic Games in Beijing, 109 sets of medals were played, while in Sochi - 98, and in distant Calgary - only 46. To surpass the achievement of the USSR team in Calgary, it would be necessary to take 2.5 times more awards in Beijing.

However, big sport is a lottery. If there were no vile refereeing in figure skating, if Latypov hadn’t missed five times in a row, if our Finns hadn’t lost in hockey, we would have jumped into the top five from 9th place.

So what?

Would they declare Monday a day off throughout Russia? Or a crowd of hundreds of thousands of fans rushed to the airport to meet the victors of the Olympics?

Hardly.

If only because the frightening misunderstanding of the events around Ukraine, the threat of a new war (whether local, or global, or conventional, or nuclear) and sanctions (this time, very, very real!) Still diverted the attention of the public from fighting for medals in the Beijing antivirus bubbles.

As for the results of the Games, their main result was the absence of Omicron among athletes, coaches and all other bubbles admitted inside.

China aspired to this, and achieved this. Instead of a holiday of sports, the world saw the triumph of anti-virus events, up to the game of women's masked hockey. Thank God that the Canadians did not give oak in convulsions from hypoxia.

Congratulations Chinese! And now the experience of "zero tolerance" as the standard of the new police state can be methodically extended to all other areas of life, and even after the complete destruction of covid-19. Here our eastern neighbors have no equal. Great Xi, for example, showed zero tolerance for even age-old rules of ethics when he did not extend his hand to the president of a friendly state. It was this "gesture of hospitality", and not the victory of the athletes, for some reason that was most remembered for the entire time of the Games.