Sweden’s Nils van der Poel overturns decision to give China Olympics: “Extremely irresponsible”
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Swedish skater Nils van der Poel won gold medals in the 5,000 meters and 10,000 meters during the Winter Olympics in Beijing, setting a world record in the later races.
When he returned home to Sweden, Van der Poel took the opportunity to criticize China for their human rights violations and said that the country did not deserve to host the Winter Games.
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“The Olympic village was very nice, the Chinese I met were absolutely fantastic,” he told Swedish media, via The guard. “The Olympics are a lot, it’s a fantastic sporting event where you unite the world and nations meet. But Hitler did that before he invaded Poland, and Russia did that before he invaded Ukraine.
“I think it is extremely irresponsible to give it to a country that violates human rights as blatantly as the Chinese regime does.”
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China has been criticized for its reported torture and repression of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region. An estimated 1 million people have been trapped in retraining camps in recent years, according to researchers.
Chinese government officials have denied the allegations.
Ahead of the start of the Winter Olympics, human rights activists urged athletes and sponsors to speak out against what they called the “genocide games”.
“The 2022 Winter Olympics will be remembered as the Games of Genocide,” said Teng Biao, a former human rights activist in China who is now a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, in January.
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“The CCP’s purpose is to precisely transform the sports arena into a stage of political legitimacy and a tool to whitewash all these atrocities,” he added, referring to the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.