The Winter Olympics will open this Friday (1:00 p.m. CET in the FAZ live ticker for the Olympics, on ZDF and on Eurosport) in Beijing, in the middle of the pandemic and despite the human rights violations of the hosting one-party state.

A look at the development of the Winter Games explains how this is possible.

Pierre de Coubertin, founding father of the modern games, was strictly against Olympic honors on snow and ice because neither a bobsleigh track was excavated nor a slalom slope uncovered in ancient Olympia.

Later, as President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Avery Brundage was upset about the ski stars' commercial ambitions.

With the marketing of their successes, the downhillers did nothing different than the people in their alpine home communities who set up lifts and gondolas on the mountain: they turned the attitude to life in the picturesque terrain into money.

The Alps had forced generations to live a meager life, now it became the destination of vacationing masses who wanted to feel like Franz Klammer or Rosi Mittermaier for a few days.

When the modern media age announced itself with its sports industry, which is now worth billions, the IOC changed sides under the Spaniard Juan Antonio Samaranch.

It discovered marketing in a precarious financial situation.

What began with the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles quickly spread to winter sports.

To this day, Lillehammer 1994 is considered the ideal: Olympia in a snow-covered Norwegian village, a winter fairy tale.

This ideal will never be fulfilled again.

It is a symbol of Olympic development that the Winter Games have migrated from a small Norwegian town to the 20 million capital of an aspiring great power within thirty years.

Behind this is the inevitability of the strategies.

The business model forces the IOC to franchise its games across the continents.

After the Asian phase with Pyeongchang 2018, Tokyo 2021 and Beijing 2022, it's now off to Paris and Milan, then to North America.

All with the help of the IOC

China is said to be gifting the ski industry with the market that the auto industry has owed a considerable part of its profits to for decades. IOC President Thomas Bach applauds Xi Jinping's claim that 346 million Chinese have discovered winter sports. The logic and logistics inherent in the gigantic event Olympia explains why the staging has to work in the pandemic. In the sports shop, the flywheel must not come to a standstill. Sports federations and national Olympic committees are dependent on the share that the IOC pays them.

Xi Jinping's China has built the world's most modern bobsleigh and luge track in a nature reserve.

After the games, she is likely to be ignored by the world elite, like many other Olympian white elephants.

It snows the slopes of an arid steppe mountain range using extremely scarce water reserves and praises itself as the most sustainable host.

China sends the youth of the world behind the protective walls of a corona bubble through cross-country ski runs and over ski jumps and presents this to its own population as proof of its ability to fight the pandemic, the origin of which it denies in its own country.

All of this is done with the help of the IOC. In an “exclusive interview” with the party newspaper “Global Times”, Juan Antonio Samaranch junior, chief organizer of the Beijing Games on the part of the IOC, forbade political interference, saying it would destroy “Olympic values”. Samaranch was referring to critics in the West. And praised the "best sports facilities" that have ever existed. The downside of this complicity: the IOC is again cooperating with a brutal dictatorship. His reputation with citizens in the democratic part of the world is in tatters.

The athletes will now ski downhill, skate, toboggan and keep an eye on gold, silver and bronze.

They will check whether the Olympic spirit is spreading behind masks and the omicron danger.

You will appreciate the professional quality of Chinese sports venues.

The money guarantees them a standard that the elite demands.

Nobody can blame them for pursuing their profession and pursuing their goals.

In the best-case scenario, they think about who is directing them behind the privacy screen, who is waving at them from the grandstand of Beijing National Stadium at the opening – and whether they are waving back.

The athletes were not asked if they wanted to go to Beijing.

It's not their fault that their performances have to take place in a realm of shadows.

But it is also up to them that they do not get into this situation again in the future.

They would have to shift the statics of power relations.

In doing so, they have the logic of Olympic development against them.