This past week, I thoroughly enjoyed sitting down each night to watch the Olympics. Whether it was skating, skiing or even curling, I always found myself engrossed in whatever sport I happened to turn on. However, these exciting events held a bitter undertone because I could not forget about China’s problematic and dubious actions as I watched. 

The 2022 Winter games ran from Feb. 4 to Feb. 20, with venues hosting events in capital city Beijing and skiing towns Yanqing and Zhangjiakou. Beijing was selected as the host city for the event by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2015, becoming the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Olympics. In conjunction, China was also chosen to host the 2022 Paralympic Winter games, which begin next week on Mar. 4. 

In choosing Beijing to host the Olympics, the IOC demonstrated blatant ignorance to China’s human rights violations, including its repression of 11 million Uyghur Muslims. 

These violations against the Uyghur population have included internment without legal process, suppression of religious practices and forced labor. Last year, the United States government classified these abuses as a genocide, becoming the first country to do so. 

The outrageous part is that the IOC allowed for China, who is committing these human rights abuses, to benefit from the positive coverage and economic benefits of hosting an Olympics. The fact that this world spectacle, meant to showcase unity and world peace, is hosted in a country that doesn’t allow unity among its people, is an indictment on the nature of the games and what they represent. 

Another issue surrounding this year’s Olympics is the lack of snow in host city Beijing and its surrounding areas. On an average year, Beijing doesn’t get enough snow to host many of the Olympics’ marquee events, raising questions about why it was chosen in the first place. 

Ten of 15 Winter Olympic sports are hosted outdoors and need significant amounts of snow to create ideal conditions for athletes. To compensate for the low precipitation, China hired companies to make artificial snow, using an estimated 49 million gallons of water and 350 snow-making machines to do so according to Time magazine. 

This use of artificial snow requires an absurd amount of water to create ideal conditions for athletes. In a time when we must combat climate change, it is obscene for China to waste this much water. The effects could be irreversible on our climate. 

By choosing another location that consistently has enough snow – like the French Alps, Canada, or Norway – the IOC would have been able to show their commitment to protecting the environment. But, by choosing snow deficient Beijing, they turned a blind eye to one of the world’s most pressing issues, and instead gave precedence to their own economic interests. 

As the Beijing Olympics concluded over the weekend, it seemed as if another successful winter games had come to a close. But I couldn’t help but think about the problematic nature of choosing China to host the games, and how this controversy could have been avoided easily if the IOC was willing to show any care for the athletes competing and the current state of our world. I hope that the IOC can work to be more proactive in the future to take both political circumstances and environmental impacts into consideration when choosing host countries for the Olympics.