The Winter Olympics should bring the global community together in friendly competition. The 2022 Winter Olympics are being held in Beijing, China. There are concerns about sport washing, a tactic to use sports in order to cover up human rights abuses. There have also been a lot of lies to try to make countries look better, like North Korea lying to their people about how many medals their country got. A lot of dirty tactics have been used to get people out of the competition. Russia has been known to get competition out of the ice skating competitions or bribe judges to get better scores to stay on top of all competitions. A well-known case of figure skating dirty tactics is with Tonya

 Harding, which is now a movie starring Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, and Allison Janney. According to the New York Times, Tonya’s ex-husband planned to attack Tonya’s rival Nacy Kerrigan by injuring her so that Tonya could get selected to compete. Tonya said she had nothing to do with the attack and asked her husband not to do the attack. Tonya has blamed for the entire incident and retired from ice skating afterwards.

People are considering boycotting the Olympics, by not watching it. Countries are diplomatically boycotting the Olympics, they are sending athletes but not government delegates. The reasons are the cost, climate, and human rights issues. The costs for hosting the Olympics are high or lack of support for hosting them. There is a lack of natural snow in Beijing meaning that fake snow has to be made which is part of the climate change issue. The pandemic has affected how many athletes are able to participate. The National Hockey League has decided not to send players due to health concerns about their players. Another concern is spying by the Chinese government, which is known to have been an issue in the past. There is an app that athletes, couches, audience members, and media are all required to use. This app is supposed to track Covid-19 cases and make sure outbreaks don’t occur. Although claiming to be secure, many countries are asking their athletes to not bring personal devices to China and use burner phones to use this app. 

My opinion is that the Olympics generally are bad. What should be a friendly competition between countries turn into unfriendly and unfair competition. There have been cases of judges being bribed and threatened to give certain countries better scores. Cites often go bankrupt after hosting the Olympics, they are really expensive and don’t bring much money in. Athletes often push themselves way too hard which isn’t good. Countries are diplomatically boycotting the Olympics, they aren’t sending governmental officials but are sending athletes. Athletes should not be punished for not going to the Olympics because of the decisions made by people in the government. North Korea, although participating in the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, is not participating in the 2022 Winter Olympics. North Korea was suspended from participating in this year’s competition due to its decision not to participate in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in the summer. 

A common emotion is apathy. Many people didn’t realize it was happening this year. Another opinion is that the Olympics are generally negative on the host country and for athletes, even before the Covid-19 pandemic. A few people like that a lot of smaller sports are getting more attention. This allows for people to enjoy more sports they normally aren’t able to see during the airing of the Olympics. All of the sports during the Winter Olympics often get an equal amount of air time. This has been starting to change during the Summer Olympics, sports like archery have been getting more popular. There is a total of 15 sports being featured in this year’s Winter Olympics. 

Conspiracy Theories and What We Truly Want to See- Provided by Students

Russia and Ukraine are probably going to have several fistfights, which is probably gonna result in them kissing.

 The Olympics are aversion while cooking channels are holding cult meetings where no one sees the cult meetings because everyone is distracted by the Olympics. 

We should allow someone on performance-enhancing drugs to compete to see how high humans can jump and have one average person in each sport for comparison so that we don’t always go “I can do that”. We should also allow people to try random sports, like Michael Phelps doing a long jump. Or have weightlifters do shotput or figure skating. Or sprinters doing archery. Archers could do tennis. The actual athletes should yell tips from the sidelines while the others attempt to do them. We should also see Usain Bolt do wrestling.