Dhe Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai met the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Thomas Bach, in Beijing on Saturday evening. The organization announced on Monday morning Beijing time after the French sports magazine L’Équipe had previously published an interview with Peng. The meeting was also attended by Kirsty Coventry, Minister for Sport of Zimbabwe, IOC member and former Chair of the IOC Athletes’ Commission.
The IOC’s statement makes no mention of the allegations of sexual assault that the former first in the double world rankings made against former top Chinese official Zhang Gaoli in a post on the Chinese news platform Weibo.
“I said yes because I was scared”
In the post, which was deleted after half an hour, she wrote, among other things: “I didn’t agree at first that afternoon. I cried the whole time. When I had dinner with you and Aunty Kang Jie (Zhang Gaoli’s wife; ed.) (…) you told me to throw off my mental burden. After dinner, when I was still reticent, you said you hated me. You then said you had never forgotten me in the past seven years and you would take care of me. So I said yes because I was scared and panicked and I still had feelings for you from seven years ago. And then, yes, we had sex.”
After the publication of the post, Peng Shuai disappeared from the public eye for weeks, numerous China experts saw and still see her under the control of the state apparatus. As a result of Peng Shuai’s disappearance, the professional tennis organization WTA announced that it would no longer hold tournaments in China until an independent investigation into the allegations had been completed.
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IOC President Bach participated in a video call with Peng Shuai in late November, along with Chinese official Li Lingwei and Emma Terho, chair of the IOC Athletes’ Commission. In the press release, which also did not mention the allegations and did not quote Peng Shuai verbatim, Bach said he was relieved that Peng Shuai was doing well and that she appeared relaxed.
In an interview with L’Équipe, Peng Shuai now says she was never sexually abused. Literally it says: “I never said that anyone sexually harassed me in any way.” She had never disappeared, “everyone could see me”. She said so in December to a reporter from a Chinese-language Singapore newspaper whom she met, apparently by accident, at a skiing event in Shanghai in the presence of Chinese basketball star Yao Ming.
The circumstances of the interview
L’Équipe said the circumstances of the interview included that it was conducted in the presence of Chinese Olympic Committee Chief of Staff Wang Kan. The answers attributed to Peng Shuai are translated by Wang Kan. The French journalists had to submit the questions for the interview, which was conducted in a Beijing hotel, in advance. The condition of the interview, organized by China’s National Olympic Committee, was that Wang Kan’s translation be reproduced verbatim in question-and-answer format.