A Passport Lost in the Mail Keeps China's Basketball Star Out of the World Cup
China's women's basketball team will chase the FIBA World Cup, which opens September 4, without Li Yueru — its most influential player — after her passport was lost while being mailed to her in the United States and could not be found before the registration deadline. The explanation left fans incredulous and shot up Baidu's trending board.
China's women's basketball team has released its 12-player roster for the FIBA Women's World Cup with an explanation that reads like a prank: Li Yueru, the team's most influential player, will miss the tournament because her passport was lost while it was being mailed to her in the United States.
The announcement, posted on Weibo on Wednesday night by the Chinese Basketball Association's national-team account, runs through an ordinary list of squad decisions — three players released after the final cut, another returning to Beijing for health reasons — before arriving at the remarkable one. Li's passport had "unexpectedly gone missing during mailing in the United States," it said, and despite a multi-pronged search involving the authorities, Chinese diplomatic missions and the federation, along with several contingency plans, the document had still not turned up by the tournament's registration deadline.
The loss could hardly land at a worse moment. Li, a center who plays her club basketball in the United States, was rated the standout performer of China's Paris Olympics campaign, and the basketball commentator Fu Zhenghao called her simply the strongest player in the current squad. Her absence thins a frontcourt that will now lean on Han Xu and the towering teenager Zhang Ziyu — just as China drew a brutal group with the United States, Czechia and Italy, with the tournament opening on September 4.
Chinese fans spent the evening checking that the news was not satire. "Are you sure this isn't a joke?" one basketball blogger wrote, in a post that captured the mood, while the explanation climbed Baidu's hot-search board within hours of the announcement.
Li confirmed the news herself, thanking the authorities, the diplomatic missions, the federation and the team for their efforts to track down the document. "It's a great pity not to fight alongside my sisters this time," she wrote. "I can't be there in person, but my heart is with them all the way. Go, sisters! Go, China women's basketball!"
The federation says the search for the passport continues. The World Cup, less forgivingly, begins on September 4.