Ever since the 2008 Summer Olympics, China has essentially become the world’s most enthusiastic party-planner – the 2009 60th anniversary celebration of the 1949 revolution, the 2010 Shanghai Expo and the Shenzhen Olympiad are prime examples of a series of major international events that have been held in China since the 2008 games, a résumé that even P. Diddy can’t compete with.
The 2022 Winter Olympic games, however, is a different ordeal that China will ultimately be able to deal with, but potentially at stunningly excessive costs. For pessimists, the 2022 games may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back – or for a more precise analogy, a pretty gigantic log on an already exhausted camel.
Historically, the economic costs alone of hosting the Olympic games have been phenomenal. The 2012 London Olympics cost over $14 billion, whilst the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics came to a mind-blowing $51 billion. Although the latter number is not a great reflection of how much the Chinese Winter games will cost given that Sochi’s venues and infrastructure had to be built essentially from scratch, it nonetheless depicts the consistent trend of Olympic fiscal madness, putting huge economic strains on the ‘lucky’ cities that gets to host them. It’s a trend convincing enough to persuade many bidders, including Oslo, Stockholm, lviv and Krakow, to drop out of the race by late 2014. Beijing may have proposed a rather conservative budget of $3.1 billion for 2022, but to call this optimistic would be an understatement.
The forecast budget seems more dreamy guestimate than shrewd calculatin when one considers that there isn’t actually any snow during January at the proposed venues, 50 to 100 miles north of Beijing. The IOC came to this conclusion in its 137-page evaluation of the two remaining bids from Beijing and Almaty, claiming that ‘the Zhangjiakou and Yanqing zones have minimal annual snowfall and for the Games would rely completely on artificial snow. There would be no opportunity to haul snow from higher elevations for contingency maintenance to the racecourses so a contingency plan would rely on stockpiled man-made snow.’ No wonder the Almaty campaign slogan was ‘Real snow, real winter ambience, real winter Games.’
It won’t be the first time that artificial snow is used for the Winter Olympics, but it will be the first time that no real snow will be involved at all. One wonders whether this will quite literally be a snow Olympics built on sand.
In the face of all the scepticism and doubt, China remains confident about its ability to ‘present to the world a fantastic, extraordinary and excellent Olympic Winter Games in Beijing,’ as Xi Jinping, the Chinese Premier put it. Concerns over the practicalities have never stopped China, and the many hurdles it faces for the 2022 Games may be sidestepped effectively in the years to come. It helps that China’s domestic promotion of winter sports have taken the country by storm over the last decade, with the northeast provinces essentially transforming into China’s ‘little Switzerland’, scattered with over 500 skiing resorts.This ensures that not only will there be sufficient viewership demand to prevent the embarrassment of hosting the Games without an audience, but that the technology to provide artificial snow already exists and just needs to refined.
The rest of the required infrastructure already exists – the famous ‘Bird’s Nest’ stadium will be incorporated and the ‘Water Cube’, in which Michael Phelps shocked the world in 2008, will be (ingeniously) renamed the ‘Ice Cube.’
As veteran analyst Anne Stevenson-Yang claimed, ‘the (Chinese Communist Party’s) system excels at marshalling resources and deploying them at a single target.’ Now that the lense has shifted to the 2022 Winter Games there’s no reason that the Party will misfire. This is a State after all where no price is deemed too excessive for the prestige of hosting the Olympics. More than just a carnival of sport, for China the Winter Olympics is a golden ticketing into the high-rollers club of world politics.
For the Chinese people, on the other hand, opinion is divided. Some have legitimate worries about China’s human rights record, whilst others question whether the money devoted to 2022 could be better used.
The nationwide euphoria that accompanied the announcement of Beijing’s winning bid for the Summer Olympics in 2001 was also marred by similar concerns. Yet as time elapsed, excitement overwhelmed scepticism, and the whole nation was gradually enveloped in an Olympics-induced frenzy. With the 2022 Winter Games, China is again presented with the rare opportunity to provide a stimulant for the economy and, perhaps more importantly, a platform on which it can display the nation’s unity and progress.
If China plays its cards right, the excitement will be real even if the snow is not.
