China replicates ‘closed loop’ from Beijing Olympics for rare sports event, as thousands gather for table tennis
- Sport’s world team championships start on Friday in Chengdu, which until recently was under lockdown
- Athletes, staff and others will be kept in safety bubble to satisfy country’s strict Covid policies
China will replicate its Covid-secure Olympic bubble when it hosts its first major international sports event since the Beijing Winter Games – with organisers calling it a “roller-coaster ride”.
Chengdu, which until recently was under lockdown and was also rattled by an earthquake earlier this month, will stage the table tennis world team championships from Friday for 10 days.
Much like the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics at the start of the year, the tournament will unfold in a “closed loop” to satisfy the strict zero-Covid policies which have seen most other major sports events in China cancelled throughout the pandemic.
The chief executive of the ITTF, the governing body of table tennis, called it “one of the most – if not the most – complex and important table tennis events in ITTF history”.
Nearly 1,300 people will be encased in the championships’ bubble.
“The road to Chengdu was indeed bumpy or a roller-coaster ride,” Steve Dainton said.
The competition was pushed back once because of an upsurge in coronavirus cases driven by the Omicron variant at the beginning of the year.
Then, with less than a month to go, the southwestern city of Chengdu found itself under a tight lockdown that closed schools, disrupted businesses and forced residents to stay home for over two weeks.
