2022 Winter Olympics Parade of Nations
During the Parade of Nations within the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics opening ceremony on February 4, athletes and officials from each participating country marched in the Beijing National Stadium preceded by their flag and placard bearer bearing the respective country's name. Each flag bearer was chosen either by the nation's National Olympic Committee or by the team of athletes themselves.
== Parade order ==
By tradition, Greece entered first as the originator of the Olympics, and China entered last as host. Per a new rule introduced by the International Olympic Committee at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Italy entered second-to-last as the upcoming host of the 2026 Winter Olympics. All nations in between entered in the order of the host nation's language, Simplified Chinese.
As part of sanctions due to the Russian doping scandal, Russia was not allowed to directly use its name or flag, and entered under the acronym ROC after the Russian Olympic Committee and its flag.
Announcers in the stadium read off the names of the marching nations in Mandarin Chinese (the official language of the host country), English and French (the official languages of the Olympics) with music accompanying the athletes as they marched into the stadium.
According to the current version of the Olympic Charter, each nation had the option of having two flag bearers (a man and a woman) in an effort to promote gender equality.
=== Sort order ===
As Chinese characters do not have an alphabetical order, they were sorted based on stroke count. Specifically:Characters with fewer strokes march earlier, so San Marino (圣马力诺) marched before Kyrgyzstan (吉尔吉斯斯坦) because 圣 has 5 strokes and 吉 has 6 strokes.
If the initial characters have the same number of strokes, then the stroke orders of the two characters are grouped in the order 橫竖撇捺折 (horizontal/vertical/left falling/right falling/fold). For example, Denmark (丹麦) marched before Brazil (巴西) because 丹 has four strokes in the order ㇓㇆㇔㇐ (3541), while 巴 has four strokes in the order ㇕丨㇐㇟ (5215).
The second characters are not compared, even though 麦 has more strokes than 西.
While it is possible to have a pair of characters with the same stroke count and the same stroke order groups, this did not occur during the parade. If the initial characters are identical, the second characters of each nation are used, and so on.
== List ==
The following is a list of each country's flag bearer. The list is sorted by the sequence that each nation appeared in the Parade of Nations. The names are given in their official designations by the IOC, and the Chinese names follow their official designations by the Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.
== Notes ==