They greet you off the plane in full hazmat suits and shove a swab so far up your nose it is not unusual to draw blood.
They then bus you to a downtown hotel where you await your Covid results knowing a positive test means being carted off to a Chinese isolation facility.
The Olympics have never been for the faint-hearted but these Winter Games are taking it to a whole new level - and we haven’t yet started.
It begins long before you fly to Beijing, with organisers requiring 14 days of Covid testing and temperature checks to be logged on their official app.
In the 96 hours before take-off there are additional PCR tests on two different days with a provider specially sanctioned by the Chinese.
Fail any of these, at a time when the UK is still experiencing tens of thousands of new daily infections, and your Olympics are over before they begin.
Even making it through unscathed to the day of travel guarantees nothing. Only then is your application assessed and a decision made on whether to issue the two QR codes required to access the Olympics’ closed loop.
Clear blue skies greeted our arrival. There was a chill in the air, next to nobody out on the streets.
Inside the terminal the French team traipsed off our flight from Paris looking a little anxious.
Not just because they had witnessed Britain’s former Olympic ice skating champion Robin Cousins having a swab thrust so far up his nostril it actually disappeared from view.
But because of the realisation that quarantine after a positive case in China is not the five days it is now at home, but 21, the duration of the Games.
One traveller complained that the testing process was so ghastly a couple of his colleagues had nose bleeds. "It felt like they tried to take out the brain!" he said.
Even for those testing negative there is no easing off. Daily tests continue for the next three weeks.
There are warnings of cyber attacks which led British Olympic chiefs to offer all their athletes temporary burner phones prior to departure.
There will be no crowds and temperatures on the mountain in Zhangjiakou, where skier Dave Ryding and snowboarder Charlotte Bankes offer Team GB strong medal chances, are pushing minus 20 celsius.
Yet the most challenging of Games is not without warmth. As we passed through Immigration a woman's voice could be heard from behind goggles and a mask.
"Welcome to our country," she said. "A very happy Chinese New Year."
