“There was no movement”
WTA boss fights for contact with Peng Shuai
03/11/2022, 11:18 p.m
No one seriously knows how Peng Shuai is doing. There has been no new information from the tennis player since the Olympic Games. Her performances, staged in Beijing, say nothing about her condition. But the WTA Women’s Tennis Association is not letting up.
WTA boss Steve Simon has had no new information on the situation of tennis player Peng Shuai since the Olympic Games in China. “I don’t think anything has changed since then. There was no movement,” he said on Friday on the sidelines of the WTA tournament in Indian Wells. “But we keep working hard. It’s a situation that just takes time.” The women’s tennis association WTA has been campaigning for the former world number one in doubles for months.
The Peng Shuai case has moved the world since the now 36-year-old published allegations of sexual assault by a top Chinese politician on the social network Weibo in November. The post was deleted soon after, and she was gone. Peng Shuai later denied making the allegations. However, their statements seemed posed.
The WTA has been trying to get in direct contact with her ever since. Because Shuai disappeared for weeks after the allegations, the WTA ended its business relationship with China and no longer holds tournaments in the country.
There has been no progress in the past few weeks, Simon said. “We saw what the rest of the world saw. But we had no direct communication with her,” he said, repeating his request to the Chinese government: “It’s up to China to get things moving here. It’s up to them to do the right thing and deal with allegations of sexual abuse.”
A long-term solution to the situation is “to confirm that she is free to live a normal and unencumbered life and to investigate the situation,” Simon said. You have to be able to understand what happened.