Japan’s Olympic gymnastics team will head into the Paris Games this week without its captain, Shoko Miyata, after she withdrew from the team following an investigation that found she had violated the squad’s code of conduct by smoking and drinking alcohol.
In a news conference last week, officials with the Japan Gymnastics Association, which conducted the investigation, announced Miyata’s withdrawal from the Olympics, saying that “both parties discussed the matter” and that Miyata had decided not to compete.
The Japan Gymnastics Association’s code of conduct forbids drinking or smoking while in official team programs, regardless of age. The legal age for drinking and smoking in Japan is 20; Miyata is 19.
Miyata allegedly violated the code of conduct on two occasions; once in a private residence in Tokyo, and again in a classroom of the Athlete’s Village of Japan’s National Training Center, according to gymnastics officials.
Her withdrawal spurred debate in Japan and elsewhere. While some noted that it was Miyata who ostensibly withdrew herself from the competition, others said the outcome was unduly harsh in a country where high athletic standards can place excessive pressure on young competitors.
“I think it was a problem, but I don’t think it was serious enough to strip her of her right to represent Japan,” Dai Tamesue, a three-time Olympic hurdler for Japan, said in Japanese in a post on the social platform X.
Controversy surrounding high-performing athletes, drugs and alcohol emerges each Olympic cycle, though many of those stories involve the use of marijuana, or doping. This year, a Danish badminton star withdrew from the Olympics after violating an anti-doping rule that requires athletes to regularly report their whereabouts in the months leading up to the Games.
Star American sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson was controversially kept from the U.S. Olympic team in 2021 after testing positive for THC, the main psychoactive component in marijuana. Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps lost a sponsorship deal after he was photographed using marijuana in 2008, not long after the Beijing Olympics catapulted him to international fame.
And on Tuesday, Charlotte Dujardin of Britain’s equestrian team said she was pulling out of the Paris Games because of a video showing “errors in judgment” on her part.
“What happened was completely out of character and does not reflect how I train my horses or coach my pupils,” Dujardin said on social media. She did not elaborate on what the video contained or where or how it had emerged.
Miyata’s Instagram account appeared to have been deactivated as of Monday. Quoting Miyata, a Japanese Olympic official said the gymnast had been overwhelmed by the amount of pressure around the Games, where there was hope that the Japanese team, under Miyata’s captainship, could medal in women’s gymnastics for the first time since 1964.
“She’s an athlete with a future,” Kosei Inoue, the vice president of the Japanese Olympic Committee, reportedly said of Miyata. “We’ll examine what we can do with her team and the JGA.”
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