BEIJING — If the Chinese government understood Western sensibilities as well as it purports to, there might have been a way to avoid turning the saga of former professional tennis star Peng Shuai into a sideshow that brings an even more suspicious international eye to these Beijing Games.
But it certainly wasn’t Monday’s “oh, by the way” revelation that she had already been inside the Olympic bubble over the weekend, dined with IOC president Thomas Bach and participated in a tightly controlled interview with French publication L’Equipe.
At this point, if you could put a camera directly into Bach’s body, you’d find only gelatin where his spine used to be and a temporal lobe that has been taken over by propaganda made of cellophane. We could never count on the IOC for honesty or ethical courage but is all semblance of common sense now property of the Chinese, too?
People, of course, can take in all the evidence they’ve seen about whether Peng is as free and safe as everyone here claims and draw their own conclusions. That includes Peng’s now multiple public statements – including to L’Equipe in this latest interview – that her quickly-deleted claim on Chinese social media last November that she was sexually assaulted by former Chinese Vice-Premier Zhang Gaoli during an initially consensual relationship is all a great misunderstanding.
“I never said anyone sexually assaulted me,” she told L’Equipe.
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Peng also says in the interview that she was never missing for three weeks, even though friends in the tennis world and WTA Tour officials were unable to reach her. But when this blew up into one of the biggest stories in the world, she suddenly began appearing in awkward interviews in restaurants that the state-sponsored Chinese media made sure to get past the country’s Internet firewall and blast out to the West.
“I never disappeared,” she said. “It’s just that a lot of people, like my friends including from the IOC, messaged me, and it was quite impossible to reply to so many messages. But, with my close friends, I always remained in close contact, I discussed with them, answered their e-mails, I also discussed with the WTA… But, at the end of the year, their website’s communication computer system was changed and many players had difficulty logging in at this time. But we always kept in touch with colleagues. That’s why I don’t know why the information that I had disappeared spread.”
But at every turn in this story, the more China – backed by the IOC’s utter shamelessness – tries to show that nothing is amiss with Peng, the more its production value looks like the theater of the absurd.
On Monday, when L’Equipe’s interview published, Peng revealed that she had eaten dinner with Bach on Saturday. Soon thereafter, the IOC released a statement acknowledging the meeting and adding that she had attended the mixed curling match between China and Norway with IOC member Kirsty Coventry.
And yet on Sunday, IOC spokesman Mark Adams got up in front of the media and said that Peng and Bach would meet “within a few days” – when, in fact, said meeting had already happened.
Not to get too technical here, but that is in our business what would generally be called a lie. And yet, when pressed by reporters Monday whether the IOC believed Peng was sexually assaulted and whether she was speaking freely now, he had the temerity to tsk-tsk the media for his skepticism about what we’re being sold here.
“I don’t think it’s a judgment for the IOC to make,” Adams said. “We are a sporting organization and our job is to remain in contact with her, and as we’ve explained in the past, to carry out personal, quiet diplomacy to keep in touch with her as we’ve done, to meet her in person as we’ve done and now invite her to Lausanne to see us. We are, as a sports organization, doing everything to ensure she is happy and I do not think it’s for us to be able to judge in one way just as it’s not for you to judge one way or another her position. ”
But it doesn’t require much judgment to look at the totality of the circumstances and see that China and the IOC doth protest too much.
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If Peng were, in fact, speaking freely, her first big interview with a Western media outlet would not have occurred with a French newspaper that was required to submit questions in advance while a Chinese Olympic committee official sat in the room and translated her answers from Chinese.
Peng, by the way, expresses herself just fine in English. Ask anyone who knows her about her from the tennis tour, or just go watch some of her about her old press conferences about her on YouTube.
It’s questionable whether L’Equipe should have even agreed to this interview under these circumstances. On one hand, they got a huge exclusive story of global interest. On the other hand, they had to submit to a set of restrictions that are not conducive to getting the truth.
Why L’Equipe? According to the IOC, it’s because they asked first. But that doesn’t pass the smell test, either, especially when another option was available: Putting Peng in front of the international media at a news conference with the freedom to answer any question that was posed to her.
That may not have gotten to the truth of whether she was sexually assaulted, either, but at least it would have looked more authentic than a highly choreographed interview that makes it look like the IOC wants this story to go away as much as China does.
But the IOC’s hamhanded attempts to help China whitewash one of the biggest sports stories of the last several months serve only to continually reignite questions and intrigue in what really happened, where she went after the allegation was made and what danger she might face now.
We may not get those answers anytime soon. But given the IOC’s clumsy complicity in helping China construct an official story rather than get to the real one, we can never stop trying.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism