By ED­DIE PELLS-As­so­ci­at­ed Press

BEI­JING (AP) — Long be­fore the glob­al pan­dem­ic up­end­ed sports and the world in gen­er­al, the 2022 Win­ter Olympics faced un­set­tling prob­lems.

It start­ed with the fact that hard­ly any­body want­ed to host them.

Bei­jing end­ed up solv­ing that prob­lem, but on­ly af­ter four Eu­ro­pean cities thought about it and dropped out, most­ly be­cause of ex­pense and lack of pub­lic sup­port. In the end, it was a race be­tween two au­thor­i­tar­i­an coun­tries. The IOC nar­row­ly chose Chi­na’s cap­i­tal and its most­ly bone-dry sur­round­ing moun­tains over a bid from Kaza­khstan. “It re­al­ly is a safe choice,” IOC Pres­i­dent Thomas Bach said af­ter the bal­lot­ing.

Some sev­en years af­ter that fate­ful vote, the world will find out if Bach was right. Start­ing with Fri­day’s open­ing cer­e­mo­ny at the lat­tice-rib­boned Bird’s Nest Sta­di­um, the spot­light will be trained on Chi­na, a coun­try with hu­man-rights record that trou­bles many, an au­thor­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ment and a “ze­ro-tol­er­ance” pol­i­cy when it comes to COVID. It will be trained on what fig­ures to be the most closed-off, tight­ly con­trolled, hard-to-nav­i­gate Olympics in his­to­ry.

The build-up has turned the idea of “mak­ing it to the Games” in­to as much of a lo­gis­ti­cal and some­times moral co­nun­drum as a com­pet­i­tive one.

“This is one where you can do your ab­solute best but you kind of have to jug­gle your san­i­ty and be­ing able to per­form at the Olympics, and not lose your mind be­fore­hand,” U.S. moguls ski­er Han­nah Soar said.

To be sure, if the 2 1/2 weeks of ski­ing, skat­ing and slid­ing turn out to be like most Olympics be­fore it, then it will be the ath­letes such as Han­nah Soar — and snow­board­er Chloe Kim, ski­er Mikaela Shiffrin and Nor­way’s cross coun­try cham­pi­on Jo­hannes Hoes­flot Klae­bo, to name a few — that we’ll re­mem­ber most.

But there has been so much to process in the lead-up. And there’s no pre­tend­ing that the In­ter­na­tion­al Olympic Com­mit­tee’s de­ci­sion to bring its biggest show to a coun­try that is fac­ing ever-in­creas­ing scorn from democ­ra­cies in the West — a coun­try that has been on a vir­tu­al lock­down since short­ly af­ter it sprout­ed the world’s first cas­es of COVID-19 more than two years ago — does not bring with it some stark con­sid­er­a­tions:

Hu­man Rights. Led by the Unit­ed States, a num­ber of West­ern de­mo­c­ra­t­ic coun­tries are stag­ing a diplo­mat­ic boy­cott of the Games to protest what the U.S. and hu­man-rights groups have called the geno­cide of some 1 mil­lion Uyghurs in Chi­na’s far west­ern Xin­jiang province.

— Dig­ni­taries won’t at­tend, but ath­letes still will. Ger­man slid­er Na­tal­ie Geisen­berg­er was among those who con­sid­ered not com­ing, but then de­cid­ed to make the jour­ney, along with some 2,900 ath­letes from around 90 coun­tries. Her con­clu­sion: “We ath­letes have ab­solute­ly noth­ing to do with the de­ci­sion to award the Olympic Games to Bei­jing — the (IOC) de­cides and we ath­letes are pre­sent­ed with a fait ac­com­pli.”

— Health and safe­ty. To try to pre­vent the spread of COVID, Chi­na will run these Olympics in a “closed-loop” sys­tem. All par­tic­i­pants will be test­ed dai­ly. None will be al­lowed out of the ho­tels and venues that are cor­doned off from the city and moun­tains where the Games will take place.

Par­tic­i­pants will be placed in iso­la­tion if they test pos­i­tive, and the stakes of a sys­tem that has not been clear­ly spelled out to every­one were on dis­play when Bel­gian skele­ton rac­er Kim Meyle­mans turned to so­cial me­dia Thurs­day and gave a tear­ful ex­pla­na­tion of her sit­u­a­tion.

— Ten­nis play­er Peng Shuai. Her plight touch­es on al­most all the sore points in­volved in bring­ing these games to this coun­try: The Chi­nese cham­pi­on’s safe­ty has been in ques­tion since she ac­cused a for­mer high-rank­ing gov­ern­ment of­fi­cial of sex­u­al­ly as­sault­ing her. Some of the few signs that she might be OK have come cour­tesy of the IOC, which has shown pic­tures of Bach in video meet­ings with Peng, The IOC has in­di­cat­ed it will meet with Peng dur­ing the Olympics, but its pre­vi­ous meet­ings have brought forth as many ques­tions as an­swers.

— Cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty. Many coun­tries are ad­vis­ing their ath­letes to leave their cell phones and lap­tops home lest they be com­pro­mised by the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment. Ear­li­er this week, the head of the FBI in the U.S. said the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment’s hack­ing op­er­a­tions are “more brazen” than ever be­fore.

— Rus­sia. Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin is ex­pect­ed to at­tend the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny in what some will view as an au­da­cious bit of pol­i­tick­ing on two fronts. With ten­sions es­ca­lat­ing on the Ukraine bor­der, this con­jures mem­o­ries of the 2014 Olympics in Putin’s home coun­try, dur­ing which Rus­sia in­vad­ed and took over the Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry of Crimea. It is al­so viewed by many as a slap in the face to an­ti-dop­ing reg­u­la­tors who tried, with­out great suc­cess, to sanc­tion the coun­try for scan­dals of the past decade.

— The en­vi­ron­ment. The moun­tains host­ing ac­tion sports and cross coun­try ski­ing are about 150 miles from the Go­bi Desert; they av­er­age less than a foot of snow a year. Though snow­mak­ing is noth­ing new at Olympic venues, this is tout­ed as the first Games to re­ly com­plete­ly on ar­ti­fi­cial snow. To do it, the coun­try had to build mas­sive ir­ri­ga­tions sys­tems and will use up to 800 Olympic-sized swim­ming pools’ worth of wa­ter. It brings in­to ques­tion Bei­jing’s claims that these Games will be car­bon neu­tral.

Oh, and about the sports — Nor­way is a de­cent bet to win the most medals, in part on the strength of a deep ros­ter of biath­letes and cross coun­try skiers. Rus­sia, of­fi­cial­ly called “Russ­ian Olympic Com­mit­tee” be­cause of dop­ing sanc­tions, could chal­lenge. Its men’s hock­ey team is fa­vored af­ter the NHL, with the omi­cron vari­ant rag­ing in North Amer­i­ca, de­cid­ed not to shut down its sea­son to send play­ers to the Olympics.

All in all, this is quite a dif­fer­ent look for Chi­na from the last time the Olympics de­scend­ed. That was in 2008, and the Sum­mer Olympics were viewed as the world’s chance to fi­nal­ly get to know a glob­al be­he­moth.