Beijing promises to be an off-piste, off-page and off-putting pandemic Olympics

Bobble hat? Check. Burner phone? Check. Stricken by human rights concerns and spyware fears, all but paralysed by the ongoing global pandemic, the Beijing Winter Olympics requires a kit list – and a conscience – like no other.

If Covid precautions were strictly enforced at last summer’s delayed Tokyo Games, Beijing will take things to a whole new level, by effectively sealing off the event from the Chinese populace in order to evade any chance of spreading the Omicron variant.

Olympic dreams 2022-style will be fashioned in front of empty grandstands bar a bunch of hazmat-besuited officials, its stars careering over finish lines in near silence, nostrils raw from rigorously enforced daily testing procedures.

It is not just fears of the encroaching pandemic – and the very real prospect of athletes seeing their Olympic dreams wither in an isolation facility – that has led many to question whether the Beijing Olympics should be taking place at all.

As they shovel millions of cubic tons of artificial snow onto the pistes of Zhangjikou, a three-hour bus crawl from the capital, there are no such weather-related problems in mountainous Xinjiang, in China’s far north west, around which allegations of genocide and ongoing ethnic cleansing swirl.

Tangible fears of accreditation stripping or deportation, fuelled by an admission from a member of the Beijing organising committee that athletes could face “punishment” for speaking out, do tend to put the opening day of moguls qualifying into sharp perspective.

But the ice-cold fact remains that a team of 50 British athletes will be heading to the Chinese capital with little more on their minds than writing their names in the nation’s Winter Olympic folklore alongside the likes of Lizzy