The concern showed up most obviously in the masks, the ones suddenly worn on the benches, by the referees and, remarkably, by the women playing Olympic hockey in Beijing on Monday.
The Games, long cloaked in rhetoric about sportsmanship, shared values and unity, veered into an open exhibition of suspicion when misgivings over coronavirus testing for the Russian women’s hockey team led to a 65-minute delay of a meeting against Canada. When the game finally began, it did so under a health precaution rarely seen during elite competition: Everyone was wearing a mask.
The episode, which the International Ice Hockey Federation formally attributed to “safety and security concerns,” was also a glimpse into the Western skepticism of a Russian Olympic apparatus that has a long record of bending or breaking rules, particularly around doping.