Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai attends Winter Olympics and denies she made a sexual assault allegation

Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai has told a French newspaper that international concern over her wellbeing is based on «an enormous misunderstanding», as the International Olympic Committee confirmed a face-to-face meeting and said she would be attending several Winter Olympics events in Beijing.  

L'Equipe, which specialises in sports news, published the interview on Monday, in which Ms Peng once again denied having accused a senior Chinese official of sexual assault.

The publication said it spoke to the tennis player a day earlier in a Beijing hotel in an hour-long interview organised through China's Olympic committee.

The IOC released a statement on Monday saying IOC president Thomas Bach had dinner with Ms Peng on Saturday, and she attended the China-Norway curling match with IOC member Kirsty Coventry.

The newspaper said it had to submit questions in advance and that a Chinese Olympic committee official sat in on the discussion and translated her comments from Chinese.

The newspaper published her comments verbatim — which it said was another precondition for the interview — in question-and-answer form.

L'Equipe asked Ms Peng about a post in November on her verified account on Chinese social media platform Weibo, which kicked off a storm of international concern about her.

In that now-deleted post, Ms Peng wrote about Zhang Gaoli, a former vice-premier and member of the ruling Chinese Communist Party's Politburo Standing Committee, with whom she had had a recent encounter, and she wrote she had also had sex with him seven years earlier. 

Of the recent encounter, she wrote, «I had buried everything in my heart. But why did you come back and take me to your house to force me to have sex with you if you had no intention to take