Peng Shuai will leave the Olympic bubble in Beijing this Tuesday and enter a three-week quarantine. This was announced by Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, on the fringes of the Big Air competition in the abandoned Shougang Steelworks in western Beijing. There he and the tennis player followed the victory of the Sino-American Eileen Gu, who started for China.
Gu, competing in China as Gu Ailing, won the competition with a spectacular jump in the third and final round. She had never jumped the left double 1620 safety before. Gu surpassed the previously leading French Tess Ledeux and the Swiss Mathilde Gremaud, who won silver and bronze. German athletes were not at the start.
The trip to the old steel mill was Peng Shuai’s third visit to a competition at the Beijing Games. Earlier, after meeting Bach and Kirsty Coventry, Zimbabwe’s Minister of Sport and IOC member, she watched the mixed curling competition with Coventry on Saturday and watched the figure skating team competition on Monday morning.
On Monday, the French sports magazine L’Equipe published an interview in which the tennis player said she had never claimed to have been a victim of sexual abuse. Last fall, she disappeared from public view for weeks after her Weibo post in which she accused top Chinese Communist Party official Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault. The IOC had issued a press release Monday morning after the meeting between Bach and Peng on Saturday, which made no mention of the post and the allegations.
Peng Shuai (right) watches the freestyle competition with Thomas Bach (middle).
:
Image: dpa
The Chinese zero-Covid strategy envisages that all Chinese citizens who have been inside the Olympic bubble will then go into a three-week quarantine before they can return to everyday life. Peng told him that she now had to leave the bubble and go into quarantine, Bach said on the sidelines of the competition.
China experts continue to see Peng under the control of the Chinese state. She told L’Equipe that since the day she posted her Weibo post, she’s been leading a life as it should be, and there’s nothing special about it. The interview was conducted in the company of the Chief of Staff of the Chinese Olympic Committee, and Peng’s words were translated by him.
Exiled artist Ai Weiwei, who designed the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing ahead of the 2008 Olympics, which he later regretted, said of Peng’s situation in an interview with The Guardian over the weekend: “She’s in the very safe hands of the Communist Party. They will make sure she behaves exactly as the party wants her to. It could be that she already thinks she made a mistake when she revealed this very deep, dark relationship (with Zhang Gaoli; ed.). She risked her family, friends and career. She no longer has a spirit. She has become a different person. Whatever she tells you is not true.”