Olympic Winter Games in Beijing
Manipulation of corona tests? German athletes fear arbitrariness in China
Most recently, snowboarder and medal hopeful Ramona Hofmeister was critical of the corona tests in Beijing
© Sven Hoppe / DPA
At the Beijing Winter Olympics, which start in two weeks, athletes will have to rely on Chinese corona tests. This causes unrest because manipulations are feared.
A certain nervousness can be felt among the German athletes two weeks before the start of the Winter Olympics. This is not only due to the strict corona rules, the isolated stay in the Olympic bubble or the miserable human rights situation in the communist dictatorship. There is also a certain distrust when it comes to China’s handling of PCR tests. Recently, snowboarder Ramona Hofmeister expressed such concerns: “We can simply be taken out of the competition,” she said: “If we are pulled out by a supposedly positive test, we’re in a fix and can’t do anything anymore.”
There is great concern about possible arbitrariness on the part of the Chinese inspectors: “Manipulation is wide open here. You can pull anyone out of circulation who is somehow in your way. We have no protection for the athletes and are almost subject to arbitrariness there “said DSV alpine boss Wolfgang Maier. Maier has taken a stand on the subject several times in the past few days. What if China falsifies test results to give its athletes an advantage by eliminating competitors?
Chef de Mission considers manipulation unlikely
There are enough possibilities for manipulation. Tests can be performed incorrectly or samples mixed up. Or they are simply falsified during the evaluation. That’s conceivable, said doping expert Fritz Sörgl in the “Aktuelles Sportstudio”: “It’s fully automated in the laboratory and that’s where I see the biggest problem. That these devices can of course be manipulated by the software and their data system.” In addition, it is not known whether China or the International Olympic Committee selected the test laboratories. The IOC is silent about this.
However, according to the German Olympic Sports Confederation, the Olympic teams have the option of calling an international panel of experts if a positive test result or a test procedure is in doubt. The panel of experts consists of 20 people, including representatives from the Chinese State Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the IOC. “It’s the same principle that worked well at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games,” says the IOC. The Chef de Mission, Dirk Schimmelpfennig, also emphasizes: “At the moment there is no basis at all for this assumption that manipulation would take place there, that is speculation,” he said in the “Aktuelles Sportstudio”.
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Another problem for the German athletes is the determination of the Ct value in the PCR tests. In Germany it is 30. If you fall below that, you are positive here in this country. The lower the Ct value, the more infectious you are. At the Winter Olympics, the IOC set a limit of 40, which is much stricter. That means: Even a significantly lower virus load, which according to the RKI is not sufficient to be infectious, is a positive result at the Winter Games and means strict isolation in a quarantine facility. “We have to avoid having a positive PCR test from an athlete at the airport in Beijing who had just boarded the plane with a negative PCR test,” says Bernd Eisenbichler, head of the German biathletes. At the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, however, the Ct value was also 40.
Sources: DPA, “sport show”, “Mirror”, ZDF