Brittany Bowe, an American speedskater competing in her fourth Olympics, will be honest: Winning an Olympic medal four years ago in Beijing wasn’t the joyful moment she thought it would be.
Standing on the podium with a bronze medal around her neck, she said, “felt quite empty.” Because the grandstands in Beijing were, for the most part, empty.
Leading up to the 2022 Beijing Games, the Omicron variant of the coronavirus was quickly spreading across the world. China responded by barring foreigners, and most local spectators, from Olympic events. Only specially invited and screened Chinese visitors could attend, leaving most of the venues almost vacant.
Friends and family members of the Olympians had to stay home and watch them on TV.
“I think it was kind of the same for a lot of athletes,” Bowe said at a news conference on Wednesday in Milan. “It’s like, you’ve accomplished this thing you’ve been working for all your life, but you don’t have the people that you love and care about the most to share it with.”
Now Bowe and other athletes who competed in Beijing can’t wait for fans to start filing in. These Olympics, which officially open on Friday, will be the first Winter Games since Pyeongchang in 2018 with paying fans in attendance.
Casey Dawson, one of Bowe’s teammates in Beijing, is looking forward to “a little extra noise” coming from the stands. He said that the sound of cheering helps block out the pain he feels in his legs during races. (In speedskating, a sport that requires incredible cardiovascular endurance and lower body strength, that’s a legs-on-fire kind of pain.)
“I feel like the crowd almost carries you through the finish line,” Dawson said. He won a bronze medal in Beijing, in the team pursuit, after missing the 5,000-meter event and showing up just 12 hours before the 1,500 because he had tested positive for Covid weeks earlier and needed two negative tests to enter China.
He took 45 tests before he could get on a plane. Even then, his luggage did not make it, and he had to compete on borrowed skates.
“The whole Covid-19 pandemic tainted the experience,” he said on Wednesday.
The few spectators allowed in Beijing had to follow strict rules that left many venues in near silence. They wore masks and were told not to cheer so they wouldn’t spread the virus if they had it. They could applaud. But even that didn’t happen as it should have.
Spectators at some events, including ice hockey, seemed unfamiliar with the sport they were watching. So they clapped at the wrong moments, or didn’t clap at all.
The Beijing Games were stressful and, in many ways, lonely. There was the monotony of daily Covid tests, and the fear of testing positive and being thrown into isolation for weeks at an undisclosed location. Traveling outside the Covid-free bubble was forbidden, with everyone taking buses from their housing to the venue and back — and nowhere else.
Madison Chock and Evan Bates, the reigning world ice dancing champions and U.S. champions, said they felt grateful that those Games had not been canceled. Now, in Milan, at their fourth Olympics skating together, they are going out of their way to meet athletes from other countries, a usual highlight of the Olympics that barriers and masks had diminished in Beijing.
Chock and Bates, a married couple, also came prepared to mingle and trade pins with other competitors, an Olympic tradition. They brought 100 pins custom-made with the likenesses of their toy poodles, Henry and Stella.
“This is just the most incredible experience so far, and being able to socialize with other athletes, trade pins freely and openly without having to worry so much about Covid or bubble restrictions, has just been incredible,” Chock said. “You see the buzz, the excitement amongst the athletes, and it’s so beautiful because that’s what the Olympics is about, it’s about uniting people.”
Bowe, 37, is excited to have her family and friends in Milan, especially because she has said this will be her final Olympics.
Four years ago, they watched her compete from more than 7,000 miles away, on a big-screen TV at a watch party in Ocala, Fla., her hometown.
Now they will watch in person, with her mother, Debbie, wearing her usual blue knit gloves with alternating red and white pompoms on each finger. They are the same gloves she has worn again and again, all over the world, at her daughter’s events, so Brittany can easily spot her.
Juliet Macur is a national reporter at The Times, based in Washington, D.C., who often writes about America through the lens of sports.
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