Moscow
Russia has been moving some 30,000 combat troops and modern weapons to Belarus over the last days, Moscow’s biggest military deployment to the country since the end of the Cold War, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday.
He said on Thursday that in the two years leading up to the Beijing Games he had seen “the dark clouds of the growing politicisation of sport on the horizon”.
“We also saw that in some peoples’ minds the boycott ghosts of the past were rearing their ugly heads again,” Bach said.
“Today we can say China is a winter sports country. This is why Beijing 2022 will be the start of a new era for global winter sport,” Bach said.
He estimated China’s winter sports industry to be worth some $150 billion by 2025.
Meanwhile, a total of 55 new Covid-19 infections were found among Olympic Games-related personnel on February 2, the chair of the Beijing 2022 medical expert panel said on Thursday, the highest daily tally so far.
At least 29 cases were found among new airport arrivals, Brian McCloskey told the IOC session while 26 were among those in the “closed loop” bubble that separates all event personnel from the public.
Since January 23, there have been 287 positive tests among Games-related personnel from a total of 610,000 tests, according to an Associated Press report. “The numbers are very small,” McCloskey said. “We are confident that the system will work. But we are not relaxed. We keep all measures in place,” McCloskey said.
