For the second consecutive time and the third in all, the traditional ceremony in the cradle of Olympism will be held in the absence of spectators, as for the Tokyo Games. The flame for the Beijing 2022 Winter Games (February 4 to 20) will therefore be lit behind closed doors on Monday.
“Because of the situation linked to the Covid-19 pandemic, the lighting ceremony will be held in strict compliance with the local health protocol”, announced the Hellenic Olympic Committee, which is thus renewing the drastic measures taken in March 2020. Before the health crisis, in the history of the Games of the modern era, the flame had not been lit behind closed doors until 1984, when the Greek organizers wanted to protest against the commercial nature of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
The ceremony will be held in front of an audience limited to members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and of the Greek and Chinese committees, in the presence of the President of the Hellenic Republic Katerina Sakellaropoulou and the President of the IOC Thomas Bach. As traditionally, the flame must be lit this Monday before noon by the rays of the sun on the ruins of the temple of Hera in Olympia, seat of the Games of Antiquity in Greece.
Sunday, the sun was not there for the rehearsal on the ancient temple of Olympia. But on Monday, a radiant sun is announced, and its rays should pass without hindrance through the parabolic mirror and ignite the torch wielded by the priestess Xanthi Georgiou. The flame will then be carried away by the first torchbearer, the Greek skier Giannis Antoniou, followed by the Chinese Li Jiajun, five times Olympic champion in speed skating.
“It is one of the greatest honors for an athlete to be the first Olympic torchbearer,” said Antoniou. “Particularly for me trying to qualify and compete in these Games,” he said Sunday, on the sidelines of the rehearsal, which coincided with the 100th anniversary of the creation of the IOC’s executive board.
An express relay
Greek Vasilis Papavassiliou – a local athlete – will be the last to carry the flame this Monday in Olympia, as organizers decided the relay would be “shorter than in the recent past”. In accordance with the drastic measures taken in Beijing, without foreign spectators, the Greek Committee has indeed further strengthened health precautions for these second Games under coronavirus after Tokyo.
“There will be no torch relay on Greek soil”, the organizers had warned in mid-October: once lit in Olympia, the flame will be transferred to spend the night from Monday to Tuesday at the Acropolis of Athens, where Tibetan activists, three of whom were arrested, held a brief protest on Sunday against the holding of the 2022 Games in Beijing.
After a night in the shade of the sacred rock, the flame of the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games will be handed over in record time to the Chinese organizers: in less than 24 hours, it will have been transmitted to the Beijing-2022 committee during a ceremony without an audience on Tuesday noon at the Panathenaic stadium in Athens, before flying to Beijing. Usually, the flame travels hundreds of kilometers over several days, crosses around fifty cities and archaeological sites in Greece, relayed by artists and athletes from all over the world.
But in March 2020, with the first cases of coronavirus in Greece, spectators allowed to watch the torch relay flocked carelessly to cheer on Hollywood actors, forcing organizers to stop the race. The route was interrupted in Sparta, where the crowd gathered to cheer on Greek-American actor Billy Zane, who notably starred in “Titanic”, and British comedian Gerard Butler, who played King Leonidas of Sparta in “300”.