Please respect me: Fan reportedly steals world number one table tennis player’s underwear from Chinese hotel room as he pleads for rationality

Beijing police are investigating after an obsessed fan broke into the hotel room of current world number one table tennis player Fan Zhendong and stole his underwear.

Fan said in a Weibo post that the woman who had been stalking him for several days broke into his hotel room several times on the morning of April 6 after receiving a key card from the hotel’s front desk. He said hotel cleaning staff who witnessed the incident and surveillance cameras were able to prove the woman entered his room, Beijing News reported.

Fan is currently ranked as the top men’s singles player worldwide by the International Table Tennis Federation and is the leading player in China, where he is a major celebrity.

I have asked my fans several times to be rational, keep their distance from me and boycott fan culture, Fan said in the post. This disturbing incident has hurt me a lot. In order to ensure my personal safety, I have decided to stop interacting with individual fans, including accepting the delivery of fan mail.

Fan said she reported the incident to a police station in Beijing’s Dongcheng district, but some media reports did not mention the theft of her underwear or whether the woman had been arrested. A police document later circulated on social media by fans’ friends appeared to indicate that a police authority was investigating the matter.

This is not the first time a table tennis player has been harassed by die-hard fans. In 2021, his fans took over an airport in southern China’s Guangdong province as he boarded a plane. They required the Fan to sign autographs and pose for photos and videos, making it difficult for the athlete to get on the flight to the airport because of the crowded fans.

I do not want my personal itinerary to be tracked or made public. I ask my fans to allow me to be an ordinary person,” Fan said on Weibo after the airport incident.

He also criticized the extreme behavior of some fans.

Your action is not helpful but harmful to me. Don’t unleash verbal abuse online on the pretext of looking out for me. For some of these irrational people, I ask you to respect me. Please understand that I feel very uncomfortable being secretly photographed and filmed all the time,” Fan said.

Please watch my contests and cheer me on. That’s enough.

Fan is not the only sports star in mainland China who has been hounded and harassed by fans.

Two years ago, a video of a woman trying to forcibly put a hat on Chinese gold medal swimmer Wang Shun’s head went viral at an airport in eastern China.

Last year, Wang Chuqin, another famous Chinese table tennis player, was surrounded at the Beijing airport by dozens of female fans who refused to leave his side and demanded to take photos with him. South China Morning Post