Curling Opens Olympics in Beijing

These are not the Olympics that Beijing hoped to host.

When China was awarded the 2022 Winter Games in a surprisingly close vote of the International Olympic Committee seven years ago, few could have predicted how much the world, and the host nation, would change by the time they arrived.

But now here they are: at the start of the third year of a pandemic; as the second consecutive Olympics closed to nearly all fans; and at a moment when an increasingly confident China has made plain its intent to host one of the world’s largest and most global sporting spectacles entirely on its terms.

To get to this point, China has plowed through the obstacles that once made Beijing’s bid seem a long shot; overcome new ones by walling off the Games (and, it hopes, the coronavirus) in a closed community the size of a small city; and shrugged off condemnation on the world stage over its human rights abuses, its heavy-handed treatment of its neighbors and its increasingly authoritarian behavior.

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, who once put his personal prestige on the line in support of Beijing’s bid, has more recently hailed the Games as a showcase for “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Blending sports and power politics, he will host President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Friday, the day of the opening ceremony, as the crisis over Ukraine continues.

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Yet for a powerful and prideful China, and for its grateful I.O.C. partners, these also will be an Olympics of firsts — including, notably, in seeing Beijing become the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Games. Its Olympics will be the first for seven new disciplines, for a new generation of athletes and for much of China, where winter sports are gaining popularity.

The run-up has not, of course, been without problems. Russian, Czech and Norwegian teams have reported coronavirus outbreaks that may jeopardize their medal hopes. At least two American bobsledders have also tested positive. But big stars remain: Mikaela Shiffrin in Alpine skiing. Chloe Kim and Shaun White in snowboarding. The figure skaters Nathan Chen and Yuzuru Hanyu.

As in Games past, there were will be athletes whose stories transcend borders, like the Chinese American freestyle skier Eileen Gu, who will chase golds in three events, and others trying to cement legacies in their disciplines. Johannes Klaebo, the Norwegian cross country skier, will try to win six medals in one Games. Ireen Wüst, the Dutch speedskater, will aim for a medal in a fifth straight Olympics. And then there is Claudia Pechstein chasing one of her own, somewhat unbelievably, at age 49.

Their hopes, and their challenges, will roll out in the 17 days that follow Friday’s opening ceremony, beamed to the world from behind (mostly) closed doors, when the crowds will be absent but the victories, the disappointments, the drama and the heartbreak will be all too real.

With some of the greatest athletes of the world assembled in Beijing, the sporting competition opened Wednesday with a rock sliding down some ice.

A full 48 hours before the opening ceremony, mixed doubles curling stepped to the fore to open the Olympic Games on Wednesday evening. Rather than a typical curling team of four members of a single gender, eight teams of one man and one woman slid their stones down the sheet — curling’s long icy pathway — to the house, those rings of scoring circles at the end of it.

The evening’s schedule saw four matches get underway simultaneously at a mostly quiet Beijing National Aquatics Center, where Michael Phelps won so many medals in unfrozen water.

The United States team of Vicky Persinger, from Fairbanks, Alaska, and Chris Plys of Duluth, Minn., faced Australia, which is making its Olympic curling debut. There isn’t even a dedicated curling rink anywhere in Australia. Needless to say, professional curling opportunities are rare there: Tahli Gill, one half of its team, plans to be a primary school teacher, and her teammate Dean Hewitt is an exercise physiologist.

Two of the major contenders are also on the ice Wednesday, with Britain taking on Sweden and Switzerland taking on the hosts, China. In the fourth match, Norway plays the Czech Republic.

The favorite, Canada, is idle until Thursday.

The curling competition, like the soccer tournament at the Summer Games, had to start before the opening ceremony because that is the only way to get all the games in before the Olympics end on Feb. 20. In the mixed event, each of the 10 teams will play nine games in the preliminaries alone. With the more traditional men’s and women’s four-person competitions still to come, that’s a whole lot of sweeping.

BEIJING — The strategy is audacious and stifling, and that is very much the point.

To Chinese officials, the creation of a vast bubble was their best (and maybe only) hope to stage the Olympic Games safely and preserve the kind of “zero Covid” policy that has been a priority for the government and a point of national pride.

Games organizers said they had conducted more than 500,000 tests since Jan. 23 and uncovered at least 232 virus cases, most of them as people arrived at Beijing Capital International Airport. Eleven people have been hospitalized, the authorities said.

Here is a journey through 48 hours in the Olympic bubble:

The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing begin this week with the opening ceremony on Friday, the official start of the Games. (Competition, it should be noted, will already be underway by then, in curling, women’s ice hockey and freestyle skiing; the Games — Winter or Summer — don’t easily fit in 17 days anymore.)

The opening ceremony is scheduled for 8 p.m. in China — that will be 7 a.m. Eastern time and 4 a.m. Pacific — and take place at the National Stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest. That’s the same stadium that hosted the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Games, the last time China hosted the Olympics.

Although the Bird’s Nest was built specifically to hold events during the 2008 Games, no competitions will take place there this year. The stadium also will be the site for the Games’ closing ceremony on Feb. 20. (It hosted the closing ceremony in 2008, too.)

Opening ceremonies are a spectacle of pomp and circumstance, an opportunity for host nations to bedazzle the world through elaborate song, dance and visual effects. They provide a chance for countries to display their pride and national character to a global audience, something that China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has been doing for years as he has become the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong.

Coverage of the opening ceremony begins at 6:30 a.m. Eastern on NBC and also will be broadcast live on NBC’s streaming service, Peacock. NBC will re-air the ceremony on tape delay in prime time at 8 p.m. Friday.

The Beijing Olympics will open on Friday without several athletes and at least one International Olympic Committee member who have tested positive for the coronavirus in the final days before the Games.

The athletes come from a variety of sports and at least a half-dozen countries, and include at least two American medal contenders.

Elana Meyers Taylor, a three-time Olympic medalist and one of the most decorated American bobsledders in history, revealed on Tuesday that she had tested positive for the coronavirus shortly after arriving in Beijing for the Winter Olympics. Meyers Taylor, 37, who revealed her positive test in a post on Instagram, must return two negative test results to be released and to compete.

She is at least the second U.S. bobsledder affected in recent days. Josh Williamson, a member of the men’s two-man and four-man sleds, tested positive last week, part of what has been reported to be a larger outbreak involving coaches and others close to the team. “This has not been an easy pill to swallow,” Williamson wrote of missing the chance to accompany his teammates to China.

The I.O.C. member who tested positive, Emma Terho of Finland, announced her result on Instagram and said she would continue her work remotely while in isolation. Terho serves as chair of the I.O.C.’s Athletes’ Commission.

Not all of those who have tested positive but who are still feeling well are certain to miss out on their Olympic moments, however. Meyers Taylor, for example, could benefit from a schedule that won’t see her events start until later in the Games.

Among the latest cases:

• Marita Kramer, an Austrian ski jumper who was expected to contend for a gold medal at the Beijing Games, will not compete because of a lingering coronavirus infection. “No words, no feelings, just emptiness,” Kramer wrote on Instagram. “Is the world really this unfair?” Kramer, 20, tested positive on Saturday and had hoped that the infection would ebb in time for her to compete this week. But the Austrian Ski Federation said Kramer had recorded another positive test after returning home and would not be able to clear China’s stringent protocols in time.

• The Russian skeleton racer Nikita Tregubov, who won a silver medal at the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, announced on Instagram that he had tested positive and would not travel to Beijing. He and his teammate Vladislav Semenov will be replaced on the team, the president of the Russian bobsled federation told the state news agency Tass.

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• An outbreak on Norway’s powerful cross-country ski teams grew to include Heidi Weng, a nine-time world medalist, and her teammate Anne Kjersti Kalva. Earlier, a coach on the men’s team tested positive, briefly sending that entire squad into isolation as close contacts.

• A series of pretournament positives left the Czech men’s hockey team struggling to find enough players to practice last weekend, their coach said, and the Swiss women’s team flew to Beijing without at least two players, Alina Müller and Sinja Leemann. The coaches of both teams said they remained hopeful that their players would be cleared in time to travel and to compete. The women’s tournament begins Thursday; the men don’t play until next Wednesday.

• Russia’s bobsled team arrived in Beijing with half of its four-man squad after Aleksei Pushkarev and Vasily Kondratenko recorded positive tests at a training camp in Sochi on the eve of their team’s departure. The head coach of the Russian team, Danil Chaban, said neither man would be replaced, in the hope that they would be cleared in time for the bobsled competition, which begins Feb. 13.

BEIJING — When Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008, it temporarily closed factories across much of northeastern China to briefly tame the city’s choking smog. But as the city hosts the Winter Olympics, the air is now much cleaner.

Although Beijing had another bout of severe air pollution on Sunday, a strong wind swept away the smog on Monday afternoon. The city has had exceptionally clean air since then, meeting even the most stringent of five levels of World Health Organization standards for very fine particles that can penetrate deep in the lungs.

Data released on Jan. 4 by the Beijing municipal government showed broad improvement. For all of last year, very fine particles still averaged six times the W.H.O.’s strictest standard, which many cities in the West also do not meet.

But the average last year was less than half that in 2008. And last year’s average pollution was down more than three-fifths compared with 2013, when the city’s air was at its dirtiest.

Across all of China, the concentration of extremely small particles was down two-fifths in 2020 compared with 2008, according to a study that the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago will release this week.

Beijing still has an air pollution problem. The average concentration of very fine particles in the city’s air was still nearly three times as high last year as levels typically found in Los Angeles, one of the most polluted American cities.

But when air pollution reached its peak in Beijing, in 2013, it was eight times as bad as in Los Angeles today.

This week’s study estimated that because of air quality improvements, Beijing residents could now expect to live 3.7 years longer than in 2008. Life expectancy has been raised by 4.6 years compared with 2013, when dark smog sometimes nearly blotted out the sun.

Xi Jinping, who became China’s top leader at the end of 2012, has made environmental improvements one of his main priorities. Some tactics have been drastic, such as removing coal-fired boilers for the heating of homes and schools before natural gas alternatives were available.

That left some residents and schoolchildren shivering in northeastern China four years ago.

China has closed thousands of old factories, particularly in and around Beijing, that were operating with outdated, polluting technology.