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Olympic flame lit in Beijing ahead of February’s Winter Games

Cai Qi, Beijing Communist Party secretary lits up the Olympic cauldron during a welcome ceremony for the Frame of Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, held at the Olympic Tower in Beijing, Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2021. A welcome ceremony for the Olympic flame was held in Beijing on Wednesday morning after it arrived at the Chinese capital from Greece. While the flame will be put on display over the next few months, organizers said a three-day torch relay is scheduled starting February 2nd with around 1200 torchbearers in Beijing, Yanqing and Zhangjiakou. (AP Photo/Andy Wong).

China lit its Olympic flame in Beijing on Wednesday after the ceremonial torch arrived from Athens, ahead of the Chinese capital’s hosting of the 2022 Winter Games in February.

The Winter Games will be held from Feb. 4 to Feb. 20, when Beijing will become the first city to host both the summer and winter Olympics, amid a COVID-19 pandemic that means overseas spectators will be excluded.

At a welcome ceremony held near the National Stadium, shaped like a bird’s nest and built for the 2008 Summer Games, Beijing Communist Party chief Cai Qi lit a cauldron to symbolise the arrival of the Olympic flame in China.

The flame had left Athens on Oct. 19 and travelled to Beijing in a red lantern designed in the likeness of a Han Dynasty tomb artefact, carried by torchbearers decked in white.

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China will display the Olympic flame at Beijing’s Olympic Park from Wednesday. In early February next year, 1,200 torchbearers will carry the flame through the cities of Beijing and Zhangjiakou and the district of Yanqing, which are the competition venues.

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The torch relay route has been “appropriately reduced” due to the need to guard against the spread of COVID-19, said Beijing Vice Mayor Zhang Jiandong at the ceremony.

The ceremony went off without a hitch on Wednesday in Beijing, where, like elsewhere in China, security is usually tight.

Click to play video: 'Calls grow to boycott 2022 Beijing Olympics'
Calls grow to boycott 2022 Beijing Olympics

At a ceremony in Athens on Oct. 18 to hand over the flame to China, three protesters unfurled a banner reading “No Genocide Games” and waved a Tibetan flag.

Rights groups have called for a boycott of the Beijing games to protest against what they termed as human rights atrocities in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. China has rejected those claims.

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Greece’s Olympic Committee (HOC) said it was disappointed the Athens ceremony had been used for political purposes.

(Reporting by Yew Lun Tian; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

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