The art in these games takes place behind a fortress. The Capital Indoor Stadium is located south of the Olympic Park, half an hour’s drive across the giant city. The massive block, inaugurated in 1968, can be reached via wide ring roads. The bus rushes past more modern facades, business and residential areas in the lane reserved for Olympic traffic. Then he turns and passes the first barrier. In spirals, always around the area, he now approaches the capital hall; China built its barrier system technology on this section – almost the entire product range: security palisades, barbed wire, bars, gates and finally, guarded by soldiers, a kind of accordion fence on rollers.
Then the bus stops in front of a door. And behind it the sounds of tango can be heard.
The Capital Indoor Stadium hosts, among other things, the figure skating competitions. It is therefore part of the Olympic bubble and is completely sealed off within the Haidian district. Anyone who comes here, whether as a runner, coach or judge, is viewed by the Beijing authorities as a potential source of the corona virus. It is all the more astonishing that some athletes, like the German champion Nicole Schott, succeed in realizing their dreams in this uninspiring place of all places.
In the team competition on Sunday morning, Schott presented the judges and the spectators, who were mainly made up of members of the skating delegations, with a brilliant short freestyle. She jumped a triple flip combined with a triple toe loop, plus a triple Rittberger and a double axel: all flawless, landed on a skid, and so harmonious to the music, as if Astor Piazzolla didn’t have his tango for “Nonino” but for composed exclusively for her, Nicole. When she finally put her hands in front of her face, it was not a feigned gesture. She rated the lecture as “the technically best program I’ve ever run”.
Nicole Schott, 25, has been the best runner soloist in Germany for years and, as a six-time national title winner, has enough experience to assess her ability realistically; “I won’t be world champion anymore,” she once said. Her forte is stride and elegance, but she’s not considered a contender for fabulous hops like Russia’s 15-year-old Kamila Valeva, who dabbed a triple axel, the hardest of all triple-rotation jumps, on Sunday.
For these winter games, however, Schott, under the guidance of their long-time trainer Michael Huth from Oberstdorf, has once again cranked up the revs. Never before has she peppered a program with such difficulties. And even if the jurors only rated the lecture as the sixth best, she was happy to state “that I can keep up at my age”.
Pair skater Seegert is still in isolation, his partner Minerva Hase is only allowed to train alone on the ice
For the final of the five best teams, it was not enough for the German figure skaters. But in Schott’s opinion, even under the best of circumstances, “a wonder of the world would have been needed”. Instead, the worst scenario became reality: pair runner Nolan Seegert, 29, who boarded the plane with his partner Minerva Hase in Berlin, tested positive for the corona virus last Tuesday when he landed in Beijing. A so-called validation test confirmed the result the next day.
Seegert, who, according to the sports director of the DEU association, Claudia Pfeifer, has not felt any health consequences, has been isolated in a quarantine hotel about half an hour from the Olympic village for six days. When the team competition started on Friday, Germany’s pairs were missing. According to Pfeifer, Seegert didn’t have an internet connection in his room at the time, and he didn’t even have an exercise mat to keep fit. You have regular contact and together with the DOSB “continuous progress has been made that the situation is changing for him,” said Pfeifer. On Sunday she was able to announce that a cardio machine had finally been delivered to the accommodation.
The virus, which the Chinese Olympic organizers want to keep out of the Haidian district with wire mesh, among other things, is shaping ice skating despite everything. A runner was also isolated from another team. And Minerva Hase, Nolan Seegert’s partner, was also separated from her colleagues as a contact person and was only allowed to train alone on the ice until Sunday. Pfeifer has “great respect” for the self-discipline of the 22-year-old athlete: “You can imagine that it’s not easy for her.”
The pair skating decisions are not on the program until February 18th and 19th, Nicole Schott hopes for her colleagues “that by then they will be fit for the event for which they have trained all their lives”. Like the dancers Katharina Müller and Tim Dieck, she saw the team competition primarily as a test run before the individual freestyle. Paul Fentz, who only qualified for the team run but not as a soloist, is already flying back to Germany this Monday.
Everyone else will come back to the Corona Fortress. To show their art behind wire mesh.