By Karolos Grohmann
BEIJING (Reuters) – German multiple Olympic champion Eric Frenzel’s isolation room at the Beijing Winter Games is “unacceptable”, Germany’s team chief Dirk Schimmelpfennig said on Saturday, demanding immediate improvement.
Frenzel, a Nordic combined skier who has won three Olympic gold medals and six medals in total, tested positive for COVID-19 along with team mate Terence Weber. Both have been isolated since Friday.
The conditions, however, do not meet the standards of the athlete and the team, Schimmelpfennig told reporters, with cleanliness, the quality of food and WiFi a problem.
He said efforts were being made to improve isolation conditions for all three German athletes who have tested positive, with figure skater Nolan Seegert also in quarantine.
“Athletes knew about the difficulties here. We said it would be very difficult to arrive here without the virus,” Schimmelpfennig said.
“We are in close contact with Eric (Frenzel). The hotel room is unacceptable and there has to be a change,” he said. “We are in intensive talks with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and BOCOG (Games organisers) both on an operational as well as political level to get improvements.
“The room has to be big enough to do his exercises, it must be hygienically clean. The food needs to come regularly; PCR tests done at times that we need them, two a day. Those are the playbook rules and we got a message from Eric that we needed to improve them and we will do that.”
More than 350 Games participants, including athletes, staff and media, have tested positive upon arrival in the Chinese capital since Jan. 23.
Athletes wanting to leave quarantine must be free of symptoms and deliver two negative PCR tests 24 hours apart.
“These hotels were not shown to us in advance and we have the situation that the athletes rightly ask for improvement,” Schimmelpfennig said.
“The number of positive tests and close contacts is at a peak. That’s obviously also an organisational problem for BOCOG and the IOC.”
(Reporting by Karolos Grohmann; editing by Clare Fallon)
