In a provocative choice, China picks an athlete with a Uyghur name to help light the cauldron.

In a climactic moment to end the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics, China chose two athletes — including one it said was of Uyghur heritage — to deliver the flame to the Olympic cauldron and officially start the Games.

The moment was tinged with layers of symbolism — a man and a woman working together, a nod to China’s Olympic history — but it was the choice of Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a cross-country skier who the Chinese said has Uyghur roots, that confronted head on one of the biggest criticisms of China’s role as host.

The Chinese Communist Party state has conducted a mass detention and re-education campaign targeting Uyghur Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang that the United States has declared as genocidal. It was among the reasons that several countries, including the United States, took part in a diplomatic boycott of the Games.

Lighting the Olympic cauldron is a central ritual for each opening ceremony, as hosts invent ever more spectacular ways to ignite the flame that stays alight during the sporting festival, and the chief director of this year’s ceremony, Zhang Yimou, had promised a novel showstopper.

In the final act of the curtain-raising event, a group of six former Chinese athletes marking previous decades were tasked with a relay that circled the stadium with torches, passing the flame on to the next. In the final handoff, it was delivered to Yilamujiang and Zhao Jiawen, a men’s Nordic combined athlete.

Walking together, they placed it in the center of a giant snowflake — another recurring symbol of the ceremony — that was raised in the center of the stadium.