2022 Winter Olympic Games: All You Need to Know

On Friday the 2022 Winter Olympics begins, with Beijing set to become the first city to ever host both the summer (2008) and winter editions of the Games.

The opening ceremony begins at noon Irish time, with Brendan Newby and Elsa Desmond the flag bearers for the six-person Team Ireland at the National Stadium, commonly referred as the Bird's Nest.

The Games will run through until 20 February and will coincide with China's most important holiday, the Chinese New Year, which began on 1 February.

The Beijing Olympics will feature 109 events across 15 disciplines in seven winter sports. Around 3,000 athletes from 90 nations will compete, while a handful of countries, including the US, Canada, Britain and Australia, are diplomatically boycotting the Games.

All the action will take place in Beijing, but will be split into three zones.

Central Beijing will host the opening and closing ceremonies, along with four snow events - men's and women’s snowboard big air and freestyle skiing big air - and all the ice events, curling, ice hockey and skating.

Yanqing, a suburban district of Beijing, will host all alpine skiing and sliding - bobsleigh, skeleton and luge - events, while the Chongli district in Zhangjiakou will host the rest of the snow events such as snowboard, freestyle skiing, cross country skiing, ski jumping, Nordic combined and biathlon.

There will be daily highlights on the RTÉ News channel, the RTÉ website and social channels. RTÉ Sport will carry Irish highlights, reports and interviews online.

Human rights groups have used the build-up to the Games to highlight the detention of up to a million mainly Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang province.

In December, an independent people’s tribunal in London concluded that the People’s