The International Olympic Committee on Wednesday released a preliminary set of health protocols for the upcoming Winter Games in Beijing that suggested that the next Olympics, set to start on Feb. 4, could be the most extraordinarily restricted large-scale sporting event since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Beijing Olympic and Paralympic Games will take place in what organizers called a “closed-loop management system” a bubblelike environment in which athletes, officials, broadcasters, journalists and a large Games work force will be forced to eat, sleep, work and compete, without leaving, from the day they arrive to the moment they depart.