Winter Olympics: the creative, cartoonish and sometimes awful mascots that have represented host cities
- From Bing Dwen Dwen at Beijing 2022 to London’s 2012 effort Wenlock, dubbed ‘by far the worst mascot of any’ Games
- The characters chosen to represent a host city vary from the cute to the completely baffling
The panda mascot of the Beijing Games has been a huge success here in the Chinese capital, where fans have lined up for hours to buy plush dolls of the round cartoon, Bing Dwen Dwen.
Then last week, the character appeared on Chinese television – and horrified viewers by speaking with a grown man’s voice.
“I don’t think it’s cute any more,” one commenter said on Chinese social media. “It’s just an old man.”
The incident was a minor blemish on the character’s popularity; by week’s end, with the close of the Games approaching, the cult of Bing Dwen Dwen – one of the more ubiquitous Olympics mascots of recent years – was still going strong and drawing long lines for purchases. But it marked the latest comic mishap in the pantheon of Olympic characters.
The notion of a character as a representative of – and a distillation of – a product or event has a long and rich history across the world. In Asia, the creativity is widespread: Packaged goods are brimming with various colourful and cartoonish spokesanimals, spokesfoods and spokesfruits.
In an Olympics context, mascot characters are supposed to embody the culture of their host cities and fuel interest in the event through the merchandising of toys and other memorabilia. But they are not always a sure-fire hit. And at times, they have been downright polarising.
At the Sydney Games in 2000, for example, an unathletic character named Fatso the Wombat became a rebuke to the wholesome images of the official mascots. At the London Games in 2010, a newspaper likened the one-eyed mascots to “Cyclopean nightmares.”
