Summer Olympics Beijing 2022

In a relatively short time, the Olympics will return to Beijing. In 2008, the Summer Games were still held and now 14 years later, Beijing will be the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Games. The Winter Games will run from February 4, 2022 to February 20, 2022.

At the 128th IOC Congress in 2015, Beijing was elected by 44 to 40 votes over Kazakhstan Alma-Ata. Krakow, Stockholm, Lviv and Oslo had already withdrawn from the organisation. With the award of Beijing, the Olympics will be held in East Asia for the third time in a row, after Tokyo 2020 and Peyeongchang 2018. For the winter games, it is only the 4th time that East Asia will receive the games Sapporro 1976, Nagano 1988 and Peyeongchang 2018 were the previous times. With these games, China will also become the 9th country to organize both the summer and winter games.

As with the Tokyo Summer Games, the IOC wants to put more emphasis on more women and on mixed sports and sports that should appeal to the youth. That's why seven new parts are on the program for the upcoming games. The monobob for women, the Big Air for freestyle skiing for both men and women. And as mixed events, the mixed team relay in the short track, the mixed team ski jumping, the mixed team arials in the freestyle skiing and the mixed team in the snowboard cross.

The winter games will be held at three different locations. In Beijing itself, all indoor sports will be held, such as (figure) skating, curling, ice hockey, short track speed skating and the opening and closing ceremonies. The stadiums for the 2008 games will be reused as much as possible. The opening and closing again take place in the Birds nest. Curling takes place in the aquatics center where the swimming and diving was completed 14 years ago. And instead of handball and rhythmic gymnastics, the ice hocky now takes place at the national indoor stadium just like the Wukesong sports Center where the basketball was played last time. A new hall has been built for skating on the spot where hockey and archery took place during the summer games. Short track speed skating and figure skating will take place in the converted volleyball hall.

About 75 kilometers northwest of Beijing's city center, the Yanqing zone is a mountainous suburb of the Chinese capital filled with hot springs, national parks, ski resorts and the Badaling section of the Great Wall of China. The Yanqing Olympic venues will host both alpine skiing and sliding events: bobsleigh, luge and skeleton.

About 80 kilometers further to the north west is the Zhangjiakou Zone, a popular Chinese ski destination. The newly built Beijing-Zhangjiakou intercity rail line takes guests between all three venue clusters for the Winter Olympics in just an hour. Zhangjiakou's venues will host most of the skiing and snowboarding events during the 2022 Winter Games, including freestyle, cross-country skiing, ski jumping, Nordic combined, and biathlon.

But whether you can go there to watch the games live is still the question. As it now appears (September 2021), the Winter Games, like the Summer Games, will not be open to spectators due to the still prevailing Covid 19 pandemic.