The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics will end with a closing ceremony today (20th) after 17 days of intense battles.
About 2,900 athletes from 91 countries competed for 109 gold medals in 7 sports.
It was the first time that a hot country such as Saudi Arabia and Haiti participated in the Winter Olympics, and the proportion of female athletes participating in the event was 1,314 out of 2,892 (45.4%), an all-time high.
There were a lot of controversies outside the game before and at the beginning of the tournament.
It was an unfavorable condition for the Corona 19 mutation to spread even to Omicron, and Western countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom declared a ‘diplomatic boycott’ by sending a team but not sending a government delegation due to the human rights situation in China.
In addition, a woman wearing a hanbok appeared at the opening ceremony, raising antipathy for China’s ‘distortion of history’ in Korea.
At the beginning of the race, Korean athletes suffered damage in the short track, and controversy arose in favor of Chinese athletes.
The Korea Sports Association even announced that it would file a complaint with the International Court of Arbitration for Sports (CAS) against the judgment that Hwang Dae-heon (Gangwon Provincial Office) and Lee Jun-seo (Korea National Sports University) suffered damage in the men’s 1,000m short track semifinal.
However, the Korean team achieved its pre-game goal of ‘entering the 15th overall with 1 or 2 gold medals’ with 2 gold medals, 5 silver medals, and 2 bronze medals (14th) despite bad news such as a miscarriage in the early stage.
The closing ceremony will be held at 9pm tonight at the National Stadium in Beijing, China, where the opening ceremony of the tournament was held.
The closing ceremony, which will last about 100 minutes, was again helmed by famous Chinese film director Zhang Yimou, who was in charge of directing the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and the opening ceremonies of this competition.
Director Zhang Yimou predicted that the closing ceremony will be held at the end of the day, “When the torch is extinguished, a moment of the 2008 Summer Olympics will be physically recreated, giving you the feeling of ‘transcending’ as if going back in time.”
The next Olympic Games will be co-hosted in Milan-Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy in 2026, four years later.
Italy is the third country to host the Winter Olympics, following Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1956 and Turin in 2006.