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Chinese Olympian Zhu Xueying has questioned the quality of the medals awarded to the athletes at the recently concluded Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. She has claimed that her gold medal is already peeling. The trampoline gymnast even took to social media site Weibo to post photos that seemingly show parts of her Olympic medal starting to come off weeks after she was given the medal at the Japanese capital.
Notably, Zhu had clinched the gold in the Women's Individual Trampoline event at Gymnastics with a score of 56.635, beating compatriot Liu Lingling and Team Great Britain's Bryony Page who got the silver. In the photos shared by the 23-year-old, it could clearly be seen that the material is coming off on the upper side of her medal.
"Can your medal... peel off like this," she asked on the social media platform captioning the photos of the medal.
"Let me clarify this… I didn't mean to peel the thing off at first, I just discovered that there was a small mark (like pic one) on my medal," Xueying wrote on the social media site (via The Global Times).
"I thought that it was probably just dirt, so I rubbed it with my finger and found that nothing changed, so then I picked at it and the mark got bigger," she added.
Check out the pictures here:
The athlete said that she had initially posted to see if other athletes had experienced the same problem but her post went viral and attracted close to 20,000 comments, with several fans not being able to believe that the medal was of inferior quality.
However, the International Olympic Committee has denied any such concerns over the quality of the prize and have said that it is the protective layer that is peeling rather than the gold plating of the medal.
IOC further elaborated by saying that the protective layer is there to prevent the medal from getting scratches or marks. They even went on to say that if a medal were ever to be damaged the IOC keeps molds of all the Games' medal designs and can replace the medal without any charge in the future.
