Tennis player Peng Shuai denies that she reported sexual abuse against a former Chinese leader

The Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai has again denied that she had accused a former senior official of her country of sexual abuse.

The 36-year-old athlete, who dined with IOC President Thomas Bach this weekend, gave an interview to the French sports newspaper

published this Monday in which she assures that all the scandal surrounding her situation -which made intensifying calls for a boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics - has been a "huge misunderstanding".

"I never disappeared," he says in the interview, held in a hotel inside the Olympic bubble in the Chinese capital. “It's just that a lot of people, like my friends or people from the IOC (International Olympic Committee) sent me messages, and it was just impossible to answer so many messages. But I've always been in touch with my closest friends,” says the former world number one in women's doubles.

Peng posted on his Weibo account, the Chinese Twitter, a text last November 1 in which he accused former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual abuse.

The message disappeared after half an hour.

For the next three weeks, the athlete disappeared from public view while the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) reported that they could not contact her.

A series of videos and a video conference with Bach did not allay her doubts about her situation or whether she could express herself freely.

The WTA decided on December 1 to suspend the tournaments that it celebrates in China due to the censorship and the uncertainties that have surrounded the case.

“I talked to my friends, I answered their emails, I also talked to the WTA… but at the end of the year, the technical communications system on their website changed and many players had problems connecting.

But my colleagues and I always kept in touch,” says Shuai.

"That's why I don't know why the news spread that I had disappeared."

In the interview with

, Peng maintains that it was she herself, and not the Chinese censorship, who removed the text about Zhang from her Weibo account.

“There was a huge misunderstanding out there after that message.

I don't want the meaning of that message to be misunderstood any more.

And I don't want any more media noise around him."

The tennis player does not specify at any time during the interview what exactly she meant with the message that she ended up deleting.

“Sexual abuse?

I have not said that anyone had sexually abused me in any way, ”says the athlete, reiterating statements to that effect that she had granted to a Singapore newspaper in December.

He also stresses that after the publication of his message in November his life "has been as it is supposed to be: nothing special."

“I am a normal girl, sometimes calm, sometimes happy.

Sometimes I feel sad, other times I feel under a lot of pressure… all the normal emotions and reactions that women experience, I experience them and feel them the same”, she points out.

L'Equipe

specifies in its article that the conversation with Peng took place with various limitations, including the obligation to deliver the questions in advance and the commitment that the interview would be published without any comment.

The tennis player was accompanied by the official of the Chinese Olympic Committee Wang Kan, who acted as a translator in the interview, developed in Mandarin also as part of the previous conditions.

The interview has been published on the same day that the IOC has released in a statement that its president and Peng had dinner together last Saturday, as the two had agreed during their video conference.

At the meeting at the Beijing Olympic Club, within the health bubble created around the Games to prevent the spread of covid, the former president of the Athletes Commission and IOC member Kirsty Coventry was also present.

In that conversation, Peng expressed disappointment that she did not qualify to participate in the Tokyo Olympics last summer, vowing to travel to Europe when possible after the pandemic: China maintains a strict border control policy as part of its measures against coronavirus.

The tennis player, according to the statement, plans to attend several of the competitions that take place in the Beijing Games, and she already witnessed a curling match with Coventry on Saturday.

“Coventry and Peng Shuai have also agreed to keep in touch.

And the three agreed that any further communication about the content of their meeting will be left to Peng," the IOC statement said.

At a press conference this Monday in the Chinese capital, the IOC spokesman indicated that the organizers of Beijing 2022 were not aware of the plans for the dinner between the tennis player and Bach, which was managed through the Chinese Olympic Committee.

He also stated that it is not up to his institution to decide to open an investigation into the tennis player's case.

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