He may be the oldest man America's voters have sent to the White House in the three centuries since the state was founded.

Nevertheless, Joseph Robinette Biden should be one of the fittest.

At 79, he did as much sport as possible.

When the Covid pandemic restricted his radius of action during the election campaign, he bought a stationary bike from the luxury brand Peloton and exercised every day after getting up.

“That gets me going,” he revealed at the beginning of the year when he had to change his program. When he moved to the White House, he received the strict recommendation of the security authorities to either leave the expensive machine equipped with a monitor, camera and microphone and digitally networked via WLAN or not to connect it to the network any longer. The risk that hackers from countries like Russia or China could spy on the White House and smuggle in computer viruses and malware is too great.

Biden has always been a sporty guy. In his teens, he was a sprinting football player at high school and university in Delaware. Sport served as a tool to build himself up as an extroverted teenager: "As much as I lacked confidence in my verbal communication skills, I always had confidence in my athletic abilities," he wrote in his memoir.

Biden stuttered and needed therapeutic help.

“Exercise was as natural to me as speaking was unnatural,” he recalled.

It became his "ticket to acceptance".

Despite the harshness of the sport, Biden was "not easily intimidated, and even when I stuttered, I was always the kid who said, 'Give me the ball'." Nobody foresaw, however, that he would use the presidency comparatively offensively to get involved in sport as a politician.

Which is why his decision at the beginning of the week to boycott the Olympic Winter Games in China on the diplomatic floor surprised some.

An instrument of international solidarity

Biden connoisseurs were probably less baffled. He had never made a secret of his affection for certain athletes and teams when he celebrated the Super Bowl success on the lawn with the Philadelphia Eagles around 2017. Or when he congratulated the celebrity basketball player Sue Bird and her partner, soccer icon Megan Rapinoe, on their engagement. But unlike his predecessor Donald Trump, who for years dumped gasoline into the blazing cultural war between self-confident black athletes and the white majority of the population, he liked to hold back on the big issues.

The boycott does not go far enough for some in the opposition party. Republican Senator Tom Cotton, for example, calls the event "the Beijing Genocide Games" and demanded that American companies should not support China's Communist Party financially in view of the human rights violations and the unexplained fate of tennis player Peng Shuai. The athletes from the United States should not compete.

Such ringing of words does not belong to the style of Biden, who as a senator for decades had relied on the ability to compromise. More like his thing: Inviting politicians from more than a hundred countries to a summit meeting in the American capital at the end of the week and getting in the mood to “defend democracy and human rights, whether at home or in other countries”. An instrument to demonstrate international solidarity and to cast China's rulers in a bad light before the games worldwide.

"The United States should stop politicizing sport and disrupting and undermining the games," said the Chinese Foreign Ministry, which is trying to counter the growing headwind.

Probably in vain.

Canada, the UK and New Zealand have chosen to follow Biden's line and are obviously glad he took the lead.

It is likely that other governments will act similarly.