WNBA All-Star Brittney Griner was arrested last month at a Moscow airport after Russian authorities said a search of her luggage revealed vape cartridges.
The Russian Customs Service said Saturday that the cartridges were identified as containing oil derived from cannabis, which could carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. The customs service identified the person arrested as a player for the U.S. women’s team and did not specify the date of her arrest. Russian media reported the player was Griner, and her agent, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, did not dispute those reports.
“We are aware of the situation with Brittney Griner in Russia and are in close contact with her, her legal representation in Russia, her family, her teams, and the WNBA and NBA,” Kagawa Colas said Saturday. “As this is an ongoing legal matter, we are not able to comment further on the specifics of her case but can confirm that as we work to get her home, her mental and physical health remain our primary concern.”
On Saturday, the State Department issued a “do not travel” advisory for Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine and urged all U.S. citizens to depart immediately, citing factors including “the potential for harassment against U.S. citizens by Russian government security officials” and “the Embassy’s limited ability to assist” Americans in Russia.
Griner, who plays for the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury, has played in Russia for the last seven years in the winter, earning over $1 million per season — more than quadruple her WNBA salary. She last played for her Russian team UMMC Ekaterinburg on Jan. 29 before the league took a two-week break in early February for the FIBA World Cup qualifying tournaments.
More than a dozen WNBA players were playing in Russia and Ukraine this winter, including league MVP Jonquel Jones and Courtney Vandersloot and Allie Quigley of the champion Chicago Sky. The WNBA confirmed Saturday that all players besides Griner had left both countries.
The 31-year-old Griner has won two Olympic gold medals with the U.S., a WNBA championship with the Mercury and a national championship at Baylor. She is a seven-time All-Star.
“Brittney Griner has the WNBA’s full support and our main priority is her swift and safe return to the United States,” the league said in a statement.
Being put through to a call center conjures feelings of dread and a hopeless acceptance that you will spend a good chunk of your day on hold listening to elevator music but imagine, instead, you were greeted by your favorite Bollywood star or the avatar of a deity – it is not as far-fetched as it sounds.
Radisys, a global leader in telecoms solutions, is using artificial intelligence technology and pre-recorded video to revolutionize and humanize the call center experience with its tool Engage Video Assistant.
“We use human experts, celebrities or an avatar to provide customers what they are looking for,” the firm’s senior director of business development, Shankar Krishnamurthy, told Efe at the Mobile World Congress taking place in Barcelona.
The mystery surrounding the citizenship of U.S.-born Chinese Olympic team star Eileen Gu has deepened, with VOA learning that two Olympic websites scrubbed contradictory information about her status shortly after she won her first gold medal of the Beijing Winter Games.
The 18-year-old freestyle skier fueled speculation about her status during a post-victory news conference Tuesday when she declined to respond directly to several reporters’ questions about whether she remains a U.S. citizen. She had just won gold in the women’s freeski big air event.
The San Francisco native, who was born a U.S. citizen to a Chinese immigrant mother and an American father, switched her sporting allegiance from the U.S. to China in 2019, making the announcement on Instagram But the manner in which she made the switch has remained unclear.
Under Rule 41 of the Olympic Charter, Gu must be a Chinese national in order to compete for China. But for a person to successfully naturalize as a Chinese citizen, Article 8 of China’s Nationality Law says that person “shall not retain foreign nationality.”
U.S. authorities have not commented on whether Gu has renounced her U.S. citizenship, a decision they typically treat as a private matter.
Gold medalist Eileen Gu of China celebrates during the medal ceremony for the women’s freestyle skiing big air at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Feb. 8, 2022, in Beijing.
In recent days, the lack of clarity about Gu’s loyalties has been a hot topic for social media users in the U.S. and China, two global powers navigating an increasingly tense relationship.
Many of those commentators did not appear to have noticed that the website of the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Winter Games, Beijing2020.cn, had an English-language profile page for Gu with a biographical section containing the following sentence: “After her first World Cup win in Italy in 2019, she renounced her United States citizenship for Chinese citizenship in order to represent China at the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games.” British news site Independent first reported that information about her profile page on February 2.
The reference to Gu renouncing her U.S. citizenship remained on her profile page when VOA reviewed it on Wednesday, indicating that it had been online for at least a week.
Eileen Gu profile screenshot, Feb. 9, 2022.
When VOA reviewed the same page on Thursday, the sentence had been rewritten to say: “After her first World Cup win in Italy in 2019, she made the decision to compete for China.”
Eileen Gu profile screenshot, Feb. 10, 2022.
Also removed from the updated version of her profile was a quote that she gave to her Austrian sponsor Red Bull in December and that she has since repeated in various forms, including at Tuesday’s news conference: “When I’m in America, I’m American. When I’m in China, I’m Chinese.”
The Mandarin version of Gu’s profile on the Beijing Organizing Committee’s website contains only her basic personal, event and schedule information without any of the lengthy background details of the English version.
Also apparently overlooked by many social media users was a contradictory piece of information about Gu’s citizenship that had been on the International Olympic Committee’s website, Olympics.com, in the opening days of the Beijing Games.
In a report published Wednesday, the Taiwan News site noted that an Olympics.com article titled “Five things you didn’t know about Eileen Gu” ended with a sentence referring to Gu as having “dual nationality.”
That sentence disappeared from the article on Thursday, according to a cached view of it from that date as seen by VOA. An earlier cached view of the article reviewed by VOA shows that the sentence was visible online going back to at least February 5.
Eileen Gu profile screenshot, Feb. 5, 2022.
Eileen Gu profile screenshot, Feb. 10, 2022.
VOA emailed the Beijing Organizing Committee and the International Olympic Committee early Friday asking why the details about Gu’s citizenship were scrubbed from their respective websites sometime Wednesday or Thursday. No immediate responses were received.
VOA also messaged Gu on Instagram and emailed the management companies evolution management + marketing and IMG, which represent her sporting and fashion activities respectively for comment, without response.
Susan Brownell, an American research specialist on Chinese sports and an anthropology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told VOA that she does not believe that either of the scrubbed statements about Gu, regarding renouncing her U.S. citizenship and having dual nationality, is more definitive than the other.
Speaking in a Friday interview, Brownell also said she believes there are two main reasons for the silence on citizenship questions from China’s Olympic organizers, Gu and many of the other 29 foreign-born and foreign-raised athletes on the Chinese Winter Games team.
China has never before fielded so many foreign-born or foreign-raised athletes on an Olympic team for either the Summer or Winter Games. It recruited the 30 athletes with foreign ties to its current Olympic team, 28 of them ice hockey players, to try to improve its relatively weak performance in winter sports as it hosts the Winter Games for the first time.
“After the Beijing Games, they’re going to assess public opinion about having those athletes in the team: Was it good for Chinese sports, patriotism and the government’s image, or was there a negative nationalist backlash?” Brownell said. “It’s a politically sensitive matter that they would want to keep a lid on at this point,” she added.
Brownell said China also is wary of publicly declaring that it may have granted Gu or any of the other foreign-born and foreign-raised athletes rare exceptions to its nationality law to enable them to naturalize as Chinese citizens without giving up their dual nationalities.
“You’ve got hundreds of thousands of people in China that really want dual citizenship. If you give it to athletes, the other people immediately are going to start saying, ‘What about me?’ I think that’s why you have the silence,” she said.
Lin Yang and Adrianna Zhang of VOA’s Mandarin service contributed to this story.
Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai is again denying that she had accused a former Communist Party official of sexually assaulting her in a social media post late last year.
L’Equipe, a French daily sports newspaper, published an interview it conducted with Peng in its Monday edition.
“I never said anyone had sexually assaulted me in any way,” Peng is quoted in the interview after she is asked directly if she actually wrote the post on her account on China’s Weibo social media platform.
In the November 2 post, Peng, a former Olympian who won titles at Wimbledon and the French Open, said former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli coerced her into sex before it evolved into an on-off consensual relationship. Her post was quickly deleted and she vanished from public view for several days. She eventually appeared at a tennis event and spoke by video with Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee president, during which she said she was safe.
Her public absence sparked concern among some of the world’s top tennis players, including Naomi Osaka, Serena Williams, Billie Jean King and Novak Djokovic, and the Women’s Tennis Association suspended all of its sponsored tournaments in mainland China and Hong Kong.
Peng told L’Equipe the initial post had caused a huge “misunderstanding” and that she did not want it to attract any more attention, and insisted that she had deleted it herself “because I wanted to.” She also explained that her “disappearance” was simply due to her being unable to respond “to so many messages.” Peng said her personal life since the controversy surfaced had been uneventful, and stressed that her private life and personal problems should not be mixed with sports and politics.
Peng also told the newspaper she was retiring from tennis.
She also said she had dinner with IOC President Bach Saturday, which the IOC confirmed in a separate statement Monday.
Bach told the Reuters news agency when asked about Peng’s interview that any communication “is up to her, it is her life, it is her story.”
The newspaper said it submitted the questions to Peng in advance and conducted the interview in Chinese. Wang Kang, the chief of staff of the Chinese Olympic Committee, accompanied Peng during the interview and translated her answers for the reporter.
WTA Chairman and CEO Steve Simon called for an open investigation into Peng’s initial accusations after a Chinese state-run media outlet released a statement it said was an email Peng had sent to Simon in which she denied the allegations and insisted she was not missing or unsafe, but just “resting at home.”
Peng issued a similar denial back in December during a virtual interview that was posted on the website of the Singapore-based Chinese-language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao.
Some information for this report came from the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
Born in China, and adopted by American parents, 17-year-old moguls skier Kai Owens is returning to Beijing to compete for Team USA in the 2022 Winter Olympics where she hopes to win a gold medal in freestyle skiing. VOA’s Adrianna Zhang introduces us to the China-born Olympic skiing phenom.
