“This is such a disgrace.’

“Shame on Zhu Yi.” 

“Loser.”

Such were the on-line insults hurled at Zhu Yi, the American-born skater who defected to China in 2018 in order to compete on the Chinese Olympic Skating team. The countless heckles were posted on Weibo, China’s heavily-controlled alternative to Twitter after her embarrassing skating performance on Sunday.

 

Many of the sarcastic slurs about Yi had over 10,000 “likes”.

Zhu, who recently changed her name from “Beverly” to sound more Chinese, placed dead last in the woman’s ice skating event last weekend. Her performance knocked the women’s Chinese skating team from third place to fifth overall.

Yi was born in Los Angeles, California, to two Chinese national parents. She was raised as an average American child with immigrant parents, speaking fluent English but never bothered to learn Mandarin Chinese.

One Weibo user commented, “Please make her learn Chinese first, before she talks about patriotism.”

Another sneered, “Zhu Yi, how ridiculous your performance is! How dare you skate for China? You cannot even hold a candle to an amateur!”

During her Sunday Olympic performance, Yi fell on the ice twice; both instances were embarrassingly physical, in one case unceremoniously crashing into the wall of the rink.

In both the women’s free skate event and the women’s short program team event, the 19-year-old finished last.

Yi told reporters, “I wanted to cry. I couldn’t hold it back, and the tears came flowing,”

The Chinese government, which controls Weibo, eventually intervened and deleted hundreds of mean-spirited posts. Most of the hashtags mocking Yi were removed after many of the nasty comments had generated over 200 million views.

Weibo management published a statement Sunday evening asking Chinese fans to refrain from cyber bullying, and to please “act in a civilized manner.”