Women's freestyle figure skating Chinese social media meltdown

[cashew]

Before I get started, I'm just gonna say Kamila Valieva is absolutely breathtaking. I'm out of words to describe how beautiful and enjoyable her routines are and her ability to withstand pressure and recover from errors are beyond imagination. Amazing strength, flexibility, and mental fortitude. This girl has completely won over Chinese social media and was crowned the new queen Czarina. If you haven't seen her routine yet, go watch it on your local Olympic broadcast network now. You will not regret it.

In contrast, we have the Chinese figure skater who fell on her butt in both her short program and freestyle program. It was terrible. And then she broke down in the middle of her routine, which only speaks to her fragile mental state.

So predictably, Chinese social media lost all sense of scale.

And then CNN fucked things up even further by completely misrepresenting the nature of the grievances.

What happened?

As someone who doesn't follow figure skating and even less China's figure skating, I had to dig back through some old social media logs to figure out what caused the meltdown. From what I can gather, the Chinese skater, Zhu Yi (Beverly Zhu), is an American born to two Chinese immigrants. She skated in the U.S. until 2018, at which point she switched nationalities to represent The People's Republic of China.

Nationality switching is actually pretty darn common in sports nowadays. Hell, one of the ice dancers in the Japanese team is a Montana, U.S.A.-born (and white as alabaster) athlete who converted to Japanese citizenship. So, honestly, at first, there was a lot of excitement, because everyone knows that the U.S. women's figure skating is quite strong and the citizenry hoped that Zhu would raise the quality of China's women's figure skating.

Alas, in the 2019 national championship competition, Zhu ranked 4th at 146.07, below her direct competition (for a spot on the national team) Chen Hongyi, who scored 160.21. In the 2019 Cup of China, Zhu placed 11th at 139.63, while Chen scored 155.12 to get 9th. So, in head-to-head performances in publicly broadcasted events, Zhu clearly performed inferior to Chen. (Zhu and Chen's short program scores are actually pretty similar, but Chen's freestyle score gives her the edge.)

Zhu continues to place rather poorly in other international competitions, scoring 143.10 (13th) in 2019 CS Golden Spin of Zagreb, 132.42 (22nd) in 2020 World Junior Figure Skating Championships, 171.25 (9th) in 2021 Gran Premio d'Italia, 147.38 (7th) in 2021 CS Asian Open Figure Skating Trophy. In short, other than the Gran Premio d'Italia, her score hovers around the 140-range.

Her competitor, Chen, scored 175.77 (8th) in 2019 Rostelecom Cup, 155.41 (13th) in 2020 Four Continents Figure Skating Championships, 162.79 (21st) in 2021 World Figure Skating Championships. Furthermore, the placement in the World Figure Skating Championships was used to determine Olympic entry quotas, of which Chen earned ONE ticket for the Chinese women's singles. Given that Chen's tournament scores averages 10 points higher than Zhu, the Chinese viewers were convinced that Chen would have been given the spot.

However, after a qualification competition for the Olympic ticket, Zhu was selected to represent China. Meanwhile, fans demanded that video footage of the competing routines to be broadcasted so they can judge the performance, too. Curiously, the men's qualifications footage was released, thus further fueling speculation that Zhu got her position through nepotism.

I'm not going into the "father is a scientist" B.S., because that stuff has no basis in reality.

Anyway, point is, the Chinese figure skating viewers are already very angry at the selection. So, when Zhu fell on her butt, twice, dropping the Team rank from 3rd to 5th, social media exploded. Would sending Chen make a difference? Unlikely, given the nearly 100 point difference between China's women figure skaters and their international competition. No one had illusions that sending Chen would have won China a medal. But, it's clear to the audience that Chen deserved the ticket simply because she had better performances and thus could not understand how Zhu got the position instead.

In the midst of this anger, where social media users expressed frustration that Zhu "shamelessly accepted the ticket", as if the athlete has the choice to give up the ticket to someone else, CNN decides to pour oil on the dumpster fire by claiming that Chinese netizens are only concerned with GOLD. As if Zhu's performance was good but netizens were just unreasonable.

Now, let's get something straight, the netizens were definitely too harsh. The tone is unnecessarily brutal. However, Zhu's performance was also down right crap. It was very, very bad. Unquestionably bad. And thus, Chinese social media pounced on this biased report and started a new dumpster fire defending themselves and saying they had a right to criticize the athletes when they perform poorly because tax payers' money goes into feeding and training these athletes. (All true due to the nationalization system of Chinese sports.) So, since the athlete is training on the tax payers' money, then tax payers should have the right to make it their business to criticize the result.

Again, all true, but completely missing the fact that one can be critical without calling the athlete shameless and lazy. Y'know, tone matters.

And that's where we're at. On top of this dumpster fire, I saw a netizen who decided to make a video essay to chew out Zhu. Except, said video essayist didn't even have the confidence to show her own face without a beautifying filter slapped over it. Anyone who doesn't have the confidence to show their face without digitally enhancing their features do not deserve to criticize another person (athlete or otherwise) for their perceived lack of metal fortitude. Kindly fuck off.