WASHINGTON—President Joe Biden said Thursday that the United States was weighing a diplomatic boycott of next year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing over China’s human-rights abuses, a move that would keep American dignitaries, but not athletes, from the games.
Speaking to reporters as he hosted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the Oval Office, Biden said backing a boycott of the Olympics in February is “something we’re considering.”
Organizing Committee as President Joe Biden says that the US is weighing a diplomatic boycott of the Games.
The US and other nations traditionally send high-level delegations to each Olympics. First lady Jill Biden led the American contingent to the Summer Olympics in Tokyo this year and second gentleman Doug Emhoff led a delegation to the Paralympic Games.
International advocacy groups and some members of Congress have called for a symbolic US boycott of the games in Beijing over China’s treatment of Uyghurs and its crackdown on freedoms in Hong Kong. The participation of American athletes would be unaffected by the boycott.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said there was no timeline for a decision by the president on whether to go through with a possible boycott.
The White House has said the Olympics did not come up on Monday when Biden met virtually with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The high demand for artificial snow at the Beijing Winter Olympics will have a minimal effect on the local water supply, the organizers said on Thursday.
Water needed for snow making at the Yanqing zone where sliding and alpine skiing will be staged in February will account for just 1.6 percent of water used in the area, spokesman Zhao Weidong said at a news briefing.
“The man-made snow will not affect the local water usage,” Zhao said.
The water for the Yanqing zone will come from the Foyukou and Baihebao Reservoirs. Beijing is notoriously cold and dry during the winter and environmentalists have expressed concerns about the effect of snow making on surrounding areas.
Other outdoor events will be held in the neighboring province of Hebei where natural snow is usually more plentiful.
Zhao also said a third athlete had been quarantined for testing positive for Covid-19 after two athletes were quarantined during ongoing luge test events. All three have been transferred to a quarantine hotel “according to requirement,” Zhao said.
None have shown symptoms and are allowed to continue training while living and dining separately. Authorities have not released their names or nationalities but said the two who earlier tested positive arrived on a charter flight while the most recent case was in close contact with them.
Around 1,500 competitors and staff have come into the country since the test events began in early October.
China has among the strictest Covid prevention policies in the world. Entry to the country is highly restricted, and virtually everyone who does must quarantine in a hotel for at least two weeks, even if they are vaccinated and test negative.
The quarantine requirement is being waived for the test events and the Games, but participants must live and compete in isolation from the rest of the population in China.
The Games are being held from February 4-20 amid uncertainty over the direction of the pandemic and protests over China’s human- rights record.
Olympic gold medalist Oxana Slivenko of Russia, meanwhile, was one of 13 European weightlifters facing new charges over doping in the run-up to the London Games in 2012, the International Testing Agency (ITA) said Thursday.
The cases date from the European championships in April 2012, four months before the Olympics, and follow the ITA re-testing old samples using modern methods. Of the 13 weightlifters from eight countries, 11 won medals at the event in Turkey. They are all provisionally suspended until their cases are resolved.
Eight of the weightlifters have already served bans for breaking doping rules at some stage in their careers. Most are retired.
They include Slivenko, who was the gold medalist at the 2008 Olympics and won gold with ease at the 2012 European championships. She withdrew shortly before the London Olympics citing an injury.
Slivenko already served a doping-related ban from 2018 through 2020. The International Weightlifting Federation said in March that she’s also accused in a separate doping matter related to data from the shuttered Moscow drug-testing laboratory.
Any weightlifters found to have doped at the 2012 European championships could also be disqualified from that year’s Olympics, but it wouldn’t affect the medals. The only two London Olympic medalists among the 13 weightlifters charged by the ITA, Moldova’s Cristina Iovu and Romania’s Razvan Martin, have already been stripped of those medals for other doping offenses.
The ITA has been trying to clear up weightlifting’s murky history of steroid use after an investigation last year found ex-IWF president Tamas Ajan presided over a system in which doping cases had been covered up and over $10 million was unaccounted for. AP
Image courtesy of AP
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