Sarah Lee is to defend her titles at this week’s track cycling world championships in Berlin after overcoming a dispute over Hong Kong’s anti-government protests that left her fearing for her Tokyo Olympics campaign.
The Hong Kong rider, who won women’s keirin and sprint gold at last year’s world championships, and keirin bronze at the 2012 Olympics, was caught up in a social media storm last year over comments perceived as backing the protests.
While she received plenty of support for embracing freedom of speech and speaking out for Hong Kong, Lee’s remarks also prompted calls from some for her to be banned from the sport.
The 32-year-old suspended her social media account in the wake of the controversy, while the Hong Kong Sports Institute — where Lee trains — declined to take action, saying: “There are no grounds for saying her comments had anything to do with the protest.”
Upon returning to Facebook three months later, Lee wrote that she had closed her account for “a lot of different reasons, among the biggest was that I did not want to see people abusing each other on the page, especially among Hong Kong people.”
“I have to say I have been struggling for a while, fearing there may be fabrication from the media, fearing people who may use their own words to interpret my sentences, fearing speculation made by people on the Internet, fearing getting involved in political turmoil, fearing it may affect the Olympic Games,” she wrote. “But in the end I don’t want to abandon it. I won’t back down because of these fears.”
Lee wrote herself into the history books by winning Hong Kong’s first ever Olympic cycling medal — only the third overall — with her keirin bronze at London 2012.
Voicing political views on Hong Kong is now fraught with risk for public figures in a territory that has become ideologically polarized.
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