Let It Go Already: 'Frozen' Controversy Prepares Us for Seven Years of Boring Pre-Olympics News Coverage

Here we go again indeed. If the first few days of news coverage of Beijing's journey to the 2022 Olympic Winter Games is any indication of what we can expect then we should prepare to be bored to death.

If you receive Google News alerts for the word "Beijing," then there have really been only two stories since Friday's announcement that Beijing will host the games: that Beijing has no snow, and that the song for the games sounds a lot like "Let It Go" from the film Frozen.

Really? It's like the plethora of "scorpion on a stick" stories all over again before 2008. Is the "The Snow and Ice Dance," the song in question, going to be in heavy rotation on your iPod? Are you a seven-year-old girl that's bent out of shape that Elsa's magic is being ripped off somehow?

I think we need to prepare for the likelihood that this is going to be Olympics 2.0. The largely lazy foreign press corps is going to do seven years of superficial, me-too stories. Did anyone ride out to Zhangjiakou on Saturday? How about Yanqing? Anybody do any interviews with meteorologists about the snow? How about some off-season comment from winter sports athletes?

The 2008 Olympics Games represented Beijing at its best, and if you were here, you remember that. The Winter Olympics are a smaller event, and Beijing has expanded in the last seven years, so the impact won't be quite as great, but still significant. Maybe the folks covering China can show they've also changed and improved over the past seven years. Otherwise, yawn.

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Photo: Disney