Under the blasts of thousands of fireworks and other sources of piping hot air, these 24th and most troubled of Winter Olympics were declared open on Friday night.
If you have to credit the Chinese organisers, if you still feel compelled to do so, then they certainly know how to put on a show.
Of course, whether you actually bought what we were seeing at the Bird’s Nest Stadium, of united communities and global togetherness on the eve of these Games, depends on your opinion of bigger pictures.
Flag bearers Dave Ryding and Eve Muirhead lead the GB team at the Beijing National Stadium
And how much you can swallow. Certainly the Chinese nailed the script they wanted so badly to perform.
On matters of pyrotechnics and choreographed dance and smaltz, it was just about perfect – truly a visual spectacular.
But for taste? For brazenness? Goodness, those folk at the International Olympic Committee and Beijing 2022 had more front than the Great Wall.
Perhaps the only detail worth knowing at this point is that when it was all said and nearly all done after two hours, they sent a pair of female Chinese athletes up to the cauldron with a torch.
One of them was a cross-country skier named Dinigeer Yilamujiang and she is a Uyghur from Xinjiang. Bloody hell, they even filmed her delighted family.
The 24th edition of the Winter Olympics were declared open on Friday night
Which to those who came up with the stunt was all very clever, no doubt. To other Uyghurs, and other families, quite possibly not. We heard claims in these pages last week about one million Uyghurs and Turkic muslims in ‘re-education’ camps. Of terrifying accounts of torture, sterilisations, mass rape and disappearances, delivered under the pretence of anti-extremism.
We have been told of thousands of family members abroad ringing into phones that have not been answered since 2017. Of Tibet and Hong Kong and brutal oppression by the Chinese government. Of ‘crimes against humanity’ in the detailed view of Human Rights Watch. They call an Olympics on such bloodied soil ‘sportwashing’.
The feeling among those who truly know this terrible topic is that the human rights situation in China has escalated dramatically in the 14 years since this same city hosted the summer Games of 2008.
Back then, the main clouds of note in the area were smog; the cloud over this colder product is considerably darker, nastier and scarier. With a tremor in her voice, Rahima Mahmut of the Uyghur World Congress told this newspaper the outrageous oversight that permitted the Berlin Games of 1936 is playing out all over again, in plain sight.
The weird and wonderful Winter Olympics will fuse sporting excellence with delightful tales
Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t enjoy the sport that we will see over the next fortnight, just that we should face the right direction while we do so and hope against all sensible judgement for better decisions from those blind-eyed buffoons at the IOC in future.
As ever, the sport will thrill us, in the weird, wonderful and unfamiliar ways that the Winter Olympics often can. Just like its warmer cousin, it will bring you in with its unparalleled ability to fuse sporting excellence with delightful tales.
Just consider a few of those behind the 91 flags that paraded on Friday. There were the Jamaicans and their bobsleigh team, breathing new life into the memories of an old film.
Here’s an amusing one – their pilot, Shanwayne Stephens, trained in Peterborough during the first lockdown and improvised by pushing around his fiance’s Mini Cooper.
The International Olympic Committee has been criticised for awarding the Games to China
When he took his seat in the stadium after the parade, he was soon joined by Richardson Viano, a skier from Haiti. In time they were accompanied by Nathan Crumpton, the chap from American Samoa.
He had walked his lap half-naked and coated in oil; on Monday he’ll slide down a track in Yanqing on a skeleton sled. Giants and the smaller guys can weigh the same.
As usual, one would expect the Norwegians and Germans to dominate, possibly to the clang of 30 or more medals.
And somewhere among the chasers, we will see British athletes on unfamiliar terrain. To Team GB, five would be excellent, six a record.
One of their best, Dave Ryding, is a gem. His dad used to sell ladies underwear on a market stall and the World Cup-winning lad is chasing a dream of reaching the slalom podium via a dry slope in Pendle.
In times of Covid positives and teary social media videos by athletes of appalling luck, who knows what will play out on the fake snow?
Torch bearers Dinigeer Yilamujiang (left) and Jiawen Zhao at the opening ceremony
Who can say where the cards will fall in the coming two weeks, and whether the strict closed-loop of Beijing 2022 will continue to suffocate those within it. Already there are gripes that this could be one of the most logistically chaotic Games since Atlanta in 1996.
In the scheme of things, that is of trivial importance. All of it is, even if sport is the best of the trivial things.
But a bigger deal is what is being endorsed here, and enabled when folk like the IOC president Thomas Bach talk of the Games being beyond ‘political disputes’. As if an ant could ever have a meaningful dispute with a magnifying glass.
When Bach was done patting his own back, he handed over to the Chinese leader Xi Jinping to declare it all open and a Uyghur lit the flame, all before the eyes of Vladimir Putin. Sport has never had such a big basket of washing.