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Rising Canadian athlete switches citizenship, hoping to compete for China in Tokyo Olympics
The reasons, Nina Schultz has said, are deeply personal and seem to predate the current turmoil in China-Canada relations
The reasons, Nina Schultz has said, are deeply personal and seem to predate the current turmoil in China-Canada relations
Nina Schultz was just 19 years old when the world realized it had a serious new contender in the heptathlon.
The New Westminster, B.C. native captured a silver medal for Canada at the last Commonwealth Games, finishing behind only the U.K.’s Katarina Johnson-Thompson, now the international number one.
But three years later, Schultz is a Canadian track-and-field luminary no more.
At a moment of bitter tensions between the two countries, she has taken on Chinese citizenship and hopes to compete for her adopted country in this year’s Tokyo Olympics.
The reasons, Schultz has said, are deeply personal and seem to predate the current turmoil in China-Canada relations. Still, some critics of the regime in Beijing question her choice.
Her maternal grandmother in China once held the high jump world record but could never compete for that nation in the Olympics because it was boycotting the Games at the time. Her grandfather was a Chinese record holder in the high jump. The granddaughter expressed a wish as long ago as 2017 to achieve what her mother’s mother could not.
For various reasons, Schultz has competed little in the past three years, but she certainly has the potential to win an Olympic medal some day, said Glenroy Gilbert, head coach of the Canadian track and field team.
“Clearly, we saw her as a rising star in the heptathlon,” said Gilbert, an Olympic gold medalist himself. “We wanted her and tried very hard to get her to stay with Canada … but this was something she was firm on.”
That said, there are no ill feelings between Athletics Canada and the now-Chinese athlete, he said.
Neither Schultz, who was born and grew up in New Westminster, B.C., nor any of her family members could be reached for comment. Her mother immigrated from China in the 1990s, while her father appears to have been Canadian-born.
Her new national allegiance was reported by Chinese media last month when she appeared at a track meet in China’s Shandong province. “I hope to go for a heptathlon medal at the Tokyo Olympics,” the Communist Party-run Global Times quoting her as saying.
The World Athletics website confirms that she’s changed nationalities and — after a cooling-off period required by the governing body — can compete internationally for China as of this April.
Given that both her grandparents were prominent sporting representatives of China, it’s likely that Schultz, knowingly or not, was a target of the United Front Work Department (UFWD), the party branch that strives to influence ethnic Chinese in other countries, said Ivy Li of Canadian Friends of Hong Kong.
“With a family background like hers … she would be monitored and worked on by the UFWD,” argued Li, who helped organize a recent petition calling for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. “If her grandparents are still living in the People’s Republic, that explains even more. The Canadian family would no doubt have been closely watched.”
Li acknowledged that young, elite athletes are highly focused on their sport and that Schultz may not have had the time or interest to read about human rights abuses in China.
But, she added, “if this young lady has the chance to read these reports, especially of the terrible systemic rape and torture of Uyghur women, I’m wondering, would she still want to represent the PRC?”
After a record-breaking run in high school and junior ranks in Canada, Schultz scored an athletic scholarship to Kansas State University. In her first NCAA meet, she won the heptathlon contest, set a new Canadian under-20 record, and notched the world’s third-best score at the time in the seven-event sport.
Then she won the Commonwealth silver in 2018. An article that year from the Olympic Channel website listed the then-Canadian as one of “ten athletes to watch” in the track-and-field season.
But even by then, Schultz had made it known she may not stay Canadian for long.
Unusually, she appeared at the Chinese National Games in 2017, telling local reporters in “fluent Mandarin,” that she wanted to compete in the Olympics for their country.
“I came here not out of a sudden impulse, but because I always wanted to fulfill my grandmother’s dream,” China’s Xinhua news agency quoted her as saying.
Zheng Fengrong was the first Chinese woman to set a sports world record, completing a high jump in 1957 of 1.77 metres — in the days before the height-extending Fosbury flop. But China was boycotting the Olympics then in a dispute over Taiwan’s status, so Zheng never had a chance to contend for a Games medal.
Schultz’s decision seems to predate Canada’s December 2018 arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, which triggered the current clash between the countries. According to World Athletics, though, it officially approved the “transfer of allegiance” in June 2019.
It’s unclear if Schultz kept her Canadian passport, but Chinese law typically does not allow dual citizenship.
The woman’s decision to compete for China at this point is “troubling,” said Charles Burton, a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing. Having been brought up in B.C., “she doesn’t seem to have strong and enduring ties to China,” said the Macdonald Laurier Institute fellow.
Meanwhile, Schultz must first qualify for this summer’s Olympics after almost three years without competing.
The heptathlete switched colleges from Kansas to the University of Georgia in 2019, taking a year off from competition; then most of the 2020 NCAA season was canceled because of COVID-19.
World Athletics rules also require a three-year break from international competition for athletes who change national allegiances.
Schultz actually left the University of Georgia more than a year ago, said Petros Kyprianou, the college’s head track and field coach.
“She just wanted to move on from the NCAA and be a professional athlete,” he said by email. “That’s all I know.”
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