A great gift to start the year. Thomas Bach had a forty-minute conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the opening of the 2025 Asian Winter Games in Harbin, China. "The two leaders discussed the close cooperation that has united China with the Olympic movement for several years", the body explains in a press release. This meeting also allowed the IOC president to present a nice gift to his counterpart: he announced "that the IOC would pay $ 5,9 million more » to the country in order to preserve the legacy of the Beijing 2022 Winter Games. This sum comes from the IOC's share of the surplus of the organisation budget for these Olympic Games. The Chinese Olympic Committee will use this money in particular to « encourage the practice of winter sports by 346 million Chinese, with a particular emphasis on young people". If China is a behemoth at the Summer Games, it is not yet at the Winter Games: it was only the eleventh nation in terms of the number of medals (15 including 9 gold) in 2022.
