Saturday, January 08, 2022
Manipulation through corona tests
DSV official draws a horror scenario
The Beijing Winter Olympics are imminent. And the German alpine boss is very worried: about manipulation and the athletes. Wolfgang Maier finds it “irresponsible to send us there” under the current conditions.
Alpine boss Wolfgang Maier fears manipulation through corona tests at the Olympics in Beijing. “With a PCR test I can immediately take any athletic opponent out of the race. Nobody needs to tell me that this is a pipe dream because you know what it’s about,” said the top official of the German Ski Association (DSV ) in the ARD.
Maier called for standardization. “As early as autumn I asked for clear regulations to be established as to the CT value from which a test is rated as positive or negative. But we do not receive any information on this. During the daily on-site tests, you are virtually exposed to arbitrariness.“
The point, Maier said, is to present oneself as a nation, especially as an organizer. Now you have a means in hand against which you have no chance. For example when it says: “Hey, you are positive, then you go out.” “If anyone still believes that you can’t reach into the box here,” said the 61-year-old. Maier also referred to snowboarders and tobogganists who had reported adverse conditions at the test competitions in Beijing.
“Irresponsible”
The sports official described the mental cinema that would start. “What it means to have to go to a quarantine room where cockroaches run around. What it means when you are locked up in a foreign country where nobody speaks English or German to you,” said Maier. These are also topics that need to be addressed. “That’s just a fact that I just want to have clarified.” Former ski racer Felix Neureuther as an ARD expert praised Maier: “I like that Wolfi shows a clear edge, that speaks to things.”
He also did not ignore the boycott issue and called on politicians not to withdraw sports funding from athletes if the worst comes to the worst. It would be “a political statement” to say that we are not withdrawing funding because the topic is so present and so precarious “that you can understand it when someone says: No, thank you, I don’t want to be there now” . He feels it is “irresponsible to send us there under the current conditions,” said the 61-year-old.
The Winter Games will take place from February 4th to 20th, the quarantine measures are particularly strict at the event in China. The corona cases had also recently increased in the Alpine Ski World Cup. “When I look at the increasing number of cases, I believe that there is a thinned field at the Olympics,” said Maier.