It is now just a week to go until the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics. Beijing has spent seven years preparing to become the first city to have hosted both the Summer and Winter Games, after it narrowly beat Almaty in Kazakhstan in a two-horse bidding process in 2015.
There are 15 sports to enjoy and 109 gold medals to be won, from the thrills and spills of alpine skiing to the endurance races of biathlon and cross-country. There’s the artistic beauty of ice skating, the high-tempo discipline and risk of speed-skating, and the aggression of ice hockey to look forward to. Plus the quadrennial rediscovery that they really do use brooms in curling. And our daily briefing will be there with you every step of the way, bringing you up-to-date results, a preview of what is to come in the 24 hours ahead, and the best of the writing from our team on the ground in China.
If you are receiving this via email and weren’t expecting it, it will be because you previously signed up for our Tokyo 2020 daily briefing for coverage of the Summer Olympics and Paralympics last year. I hope you’ll want to stick with it and join me for our Winter Olympics coverage too, but we appreciate you maybe aren’t interested. If so, it is easy to unsubscribe from the footer of the email, and hopefully we’ll see you back again for Paris 2024. Here’s a selection of some of the preview pieces and Beijing news for the Games we’ve been running over recent days:
China says it is ready for a Winter Games demonstrating the Olympic movement’s newly-enhanced motto “Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together”, but the ongoing threat of the Covid pandemic and the diplomatic boycotts and expected protests over the host nation’s human rights record are sure to feature in the story of these Games. And once again Russian athletes will be competing under the neutral banner of “Russian Olympic Committee” rather than as a nation – as a result of the Wada ban for state-sponsored doping offences.
What to look out for next
Like the summer Olympics, some of the sporting action actually gets going before the opening ceremony. Here’s what you can enjoy on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday next week. Times in the Beijing briefing are all going to be local. For Sydney add 3 hours, for London subtract 8 hours. If you are in the US then for New York it is -13 hours and San Francisco is -16 hours.
Wednesday 2 February
8.05pm Curling – the very first session sees four mixed doubles, round-robin matches, including Sweden v Great Britain and the US v Australia 🥌
Thursday 3 February
9.05am and 2.05pm and 8.05pm Curling – there are more mixed doubles match-ups across three sessions 🥌
6pm and 7.45pm Freestyle skiing – first the women’s and then the men’s moguls qualification 1 takes place ⛷
12.10pm and 4.40pm and 9.10pm – the women’s ice hockey preliminary round pool matches begin – the US play Finland in the day’s final game 🏒
Friday 4 February
8.35am and 1.35pm Curling – Australia face Great Britain in the afternoon session as the mixed doubles, round-robin match-ups continue 🥌
10.02am and 11.41am and 13.22pm Figure skating – there are three sessions of figure skating, starting with the team event – men’s single skating, short program, followed by the ice dance, rhythm dance and pair skating short program, also in the team event ⛸
12.10pm Ice Hockey – two more matches from the women’s pool stage – including Denmark v the hosts 🏒
8pm Opening Ceremony – Beijing’s National Stadium – known as the Bird’s Nest – will once again stage an Olympic opening ceremony, which is sure to be spectacular ✨✨✨
Thank you for reading. I will be back on Friday next week as we get ready for the opening ceremony. In the meantime you can get in touch with me at martin.belam@theguardian.com – I’d love to hear about what you are looking forward to and how you are planing to watch the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.
