BEIJING, Feb. 2 (BNA): Beijing kicked off early Wednesday morning the Winter Olympics torch relay, with great Chinese basketball player and Olympian Yao Ming among the first to carry the torch on a three-day journey due to the coronavirus. The emerging (Covid-19). restrictions.
The relay will carry the torch past including the Great Wall of China, which is much more modest than the event spanning globally before the 2008 Beijing Summer Games.
Due to COVID-19, the torch relay will only be seen by select members of the public.
The Games will be held from February 4-20 inside a “closed-loop” bubble that isolates athletes and other Olympic staff from the public, and only select groups of people will attend the events.
Georgios Iliopoulos, Greece’s ambassador to China and a torchbearer, said when asked if he was concerned that the 2022 Games would be remembered as the “Corona Olympics.”
“You cannot stop life and do everything we can to continue what we have to deal with. The main thing is to stay together on this and leave it behind as soon as possible,” he told reporters.
The torch, which set off from Greece in October, will travel to competition areas, including Zhangjiakou in neighboring Hebei Province, before ending its journey by lighting the Olympic cauldron at Friday’s opening ceremony.
Wednesday’s event began under clear blue skies in Beijing when Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng lit a torch from a cauldron in the shape of a traditional ritual ritual known as a zun, then handed it to 80-year-old Lu Zhihuan, who was a speed skater. He was China’s first world champion in winter sports.
More than 1,000 torchbearers will participate in the relay.
Asked during a very cold morning how he felt as an Olympic torchbearer, Yao replied, “It’s very cold, because the two previous times were for the Summer Olympics. But it’s warm if the fires in winter.”