Knock on the door: COVID-19 stalks athletes at Beijing Winter Olympics

BEIJING: For athletes at the Beijing Winter Olympics, testing positive for COVID-19 is one of their worst nightmares, and it can begin with a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

"It was insane, it was a rollercoaster," said Kim Meylemans, a skeleton racer from Belgium.

The 25-year-old posted a tearful video on Instagram last week from isolation which highlighted the perils of competing in the middle of a pandemic.

Meylemans said she tested positive about a month ago, before arriving in the Chinese capital, but "here things just went from bad to worse".

"A positive test, then negative, then positive again in the middle of the night and a quarantine hotel," said Meylemans, whose turbulent Games ended on Saturday when she came 18th in the skeleton.

"I tested negative twice each day in the quarantine hotel and then it took longer to get out of that hotel and I was shipped to another quarantine hotel."

It is unclear how many of the nearly 3,000 athletes in Beijing have tested positive, but there have been 429 COVID-19 cases in the "closed loop" bubble in which the competitors and about 65,000 others are cocooned.

Among the most high-profile cases is the American figure skater Vincent Zhou, a silver medallist in the team event in Beijing who was ruled out of the men's singles competition only one day before it started.

Suddenly, the moment he had been working up to for four years was snatched away and there was nothing he could do about it.

"I've taken all the precautions I can. I've isolated myself so much that the loneliness I felt in the last month or two has been crushing at times," an emotional Zhou said in a video on Instagram.

The 21-year-old added: "I've already lost count of the number of times I've cried today."

Bobsl