MONTREAL — In the days before Canada's athletes began arriving in Beijing with their dreams of Olympic glory, Brian Massie and Jean-François Picard were already hard at work doing the somewhat less glamorous work of scrubbing and disinfecting.

The business partners from Trois-Rivières, Que. were hired by the Canadian Olympic Committee to sanitize and disinfect the spaces used by the country's athletes and staff, including three Olympic villages, gyms and common rooms.

COVID-19, and the rise of the Omicron variant in particular, has shifted organizers' focus more than ever to sanitation, as athletes work to avoid the virus that could end their medal hopes.

For Massie and Picard, their role meant flying to Beijing two weeks before the games with a small team of employees to do a full disinfection that included treating surfaces to repel bacteria and installing air filters in common spaces. While the day-to-day cleaning during the games will be done by Chinese employees, two of the employees will remain in place to monitor the cleaning efforts, including swabbing high-traffic areas to ensure no dangerous diseases are lurking.

Arriving in China before the Olympics was "a little overwhelming," said Massie, who co-founded Proaxion in 2016. The company offers "sanitation management" services including disinfection, monitoring and janitorial services.

The company members were greeted by Chinese employees in full masks, visors and plastic suits, looking like something "in a bad movie," Massie said.

"It's like you're being scanned," he said in a recent phone interview. "Every time you enter a building you need to pass daily throat PCR tests."

But once in the village, he said the Olympic buzz began to build, and "you don't really think of any of that."

While COVID-19 has heightened concerns over sanitation, worries about diseases at the Olympics are nothing new. Massie said his company was first hired for the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, after the previous Games in Rio de Janeiro had raised concerns over mosquito-borne illnesses. The South Korean Olympics had an outbreak of norovirus, although Massie says Canadians were largely spared.

The team was once again on the grounds in Tokyo last summer — the first games since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic.

The biggest difference in Beijing, he said, was being able to see some of the athletes arrive in the village, in contrast to Tokyo where competitors were asked to arrive as close as possible to the start of their events.

"Feeling this vibe of all the athletes coming into village is really something that we didn't get the chance to live in, in Tokyo," he said.

While he was initially a bit apprehensive about flying to China, Massie praised the Canadian Olympic Committee for helping walk him through all the paperwork and complex security protocols that included switching to burner phones and computers.

In the end, he said everything went smoothly, and, as an avid athlete, he describes his Olympic experience as "a dream come true."

"We're still pinching ourselves," he said.

While he's now back in Quebec, he said the company's employees will remain on site during the Olympic and Paralympic Games to monitor the cleaning until the athletes leave the village.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 3, 2022.