Olympics 2022 -- How we ended up with a Winter Games amid China's human rights crisis

THE WINTER OLYMPICS begins this week in Beijing, and that is a harder sentence to process than it might seem. For some, the first few words — the Winter Olympics begins — matter most. For others, the last few — in Beijing — hang heaviest.

For most of us, though, the feeling about this Olympics is something in the middle. Our love for sports and competition, passion and glory is deep and abiding… but is also not enough to completely divorce a spectacle from its surroundings.

So the conflict we all face right now is this: Can we be glad that the world's best athletes are gathering to show their incredible skills on snow and ice? What if we know that to do that, those athletes have to go to an authoritarian country where, while they're skating and skiing and sliding, there are — according to human rights groups and nations including the United States — brutal crimes against humanity actively happening not so far away?

Can we be grateful that during a scary and wearying pandemic, we will be able to watch and be inspired by amazing performers on a nightly basis? Can we? What if we remember that the show we're captivated by is being put on by a nation which regularly censors free speech and where a woman effectively disappeared from public life after she alleged sexual assault against a former government official?

It is hard, this Olympics. It is hard. Chloe Kim. The Uyghurs. Mikaela Shiffrin. Peng Shuai. Shaun White. Xi Jinping. We can try to separate these things. We can try. But the truth is that, with this Olympics — maybe more than any Olympics we've ever had — nothing feels clear. Nothing feels easy. Nothing feels certain.

SOMETIMES IT HELPS to try to understand how a situation came to be. And strange as it might seem,