How China Is Spinning the Olympics
Slate Daily Feed
Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 31 January 2022
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
No one is happy with the way this year’s Winter Olympics are unfolding. Athletes are frustrated with China’s excessive pandemic precautions. Diplomatic tensions are rising. Are the second COVID games on thin ice?
Guest: Henry Bushnell, features writer for Yahoo Sports.
If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on What Next. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Henry Bushnell, from over at Yahoo Sports, he is supposed to get on a plane tomorrow. |
| 0:12.6 | I am traveling to Beijing in the words of our editors and probably a lot of other editors around the U.S. media landscape as of now. |
| 0:22.7 | If he gets on this plane, |
| 0:29.8 | Henry's going to be headed to China to cover the Olympics. Everything is to some extent tentative, |
| 0:35.8 | but as of now, I'll arrive Thursday morning in Beijing, and the opening ceremony will be Friday, and the games will begin |
| 0:37.5 | and we'll be there to cover them. You say for now. Why do you say for now? Because of COVID and |
| 0:44.2 | Amacron and all of the craziness that is happening in the world. The rules about COVID in China really don't look very much like the rules here, or even the rules in Japan during last year's summer games. |
| 1:01.5 | China is still trying for COVID-Zero. |
| 1:04.1 | You might have heard about the Chinese woman who said she got stuck at a blind date's house for four days when the coronavirus shut down a whole neighborhood, or about the |
| 1:13.3 | pet stores in Hong Kong that were culling hamsters suspected of spreading COVID. This was all over the |
| 1:20.4 | last few weeks, and thousands of journalists and athletes are about to touch down in this country, bringing their hometown germs with them. |
| 1:30.6 | I want to be pretty confident that when I get on that plane to China, I don't have COVID. |
| 1:36.4 | If you test positive on arrival, you'll be stuck in an isolation facility for 10 days at minimum, |
| 1:43.4 | and your Olympics are more or less over. |
| 1:46.3 | I imagine that for China, there might be other kinds of preparations too, like security |
| 1:53.0 | preparations. I've heard some people talk about, oh, I'm going to use a different phone |
| 1:58.0 | when I'm over there. Do you think about those things, too? |
| 2:01.8 | Oh, we have a pretty extensive plan for cybersecurity. Not many people want to talk about it. |
| 2:08.3 | Like, every issue around these games, as one official put it to me, is also an international |
| 2:14.3 | relations issue. This is the other thing about the upcoming Olympics. |
| 2:18.3 | They are happening in an increasingly brazen, authoritarian state. |
| 2:23.3 | So even if he's COVID-free, Henry's got these other looming concerns about who's going to be watching him and how free he'll be to do his job. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.