Kazakhstan Weightlifting Federation refutes rumors on Chinshanlo and Maneza moving to China

Secretary General of Kazakhstan Weightlifting Federation Mendykhan Tapsir denies that the Olympic gold-winners Zulfiya Chinshanlo and Maya Maneza leaving Kazakhstan's national team, Vesti.kz reports. “Chinshanlo and Maneza left for China for vacation. It is impossible that they will represent China. We still count on them at the world’s major tournaments. Meanwhile, we are in touch with Zulfiya Chinshanlo and Maya Maneza has to promised to contact us shortly. We will try to find out where the Chinese media has got this wrong information from. I emphasize once again that Chinshanlo and Maneza will keep representing our country,” Tapsir said. Earlier the chief coach of Kazakhstan national weightlifting team Aleksey Ni also said that Kazakhstan is not going to return Chinshanlo and Maneza to China. Besides, he noted that there is a separate agreement with Chinshanlo. “We have agreed with Chinshanlo that she will not get married until the age of 25, before the Rio Games. We will see how it goes after she wins in Rio,” he said. Chinshanlo and Maneza brought Kazakhstan two gold medals at London Olympics-2012. China then got outraged that these sportswomen performed for Kazakhstan . Weibo (Chinese equivalent of Twitter) was flooded with calls to fire the officials responsible for passing Chinese sportsmen over to other countries. Kazakhstan party tagged the accusations of “buying” the sportswomen groundless.