Norwegian student moons ref over red card, faces expulsion

In Beijing, a Norwegian exchange student has suddenly found himself in the epicenter of a campus wide crisis, with thousands of students calling for his expulsion.

The Beijing News first broke the story yesterday. This is what went down, according to the article, and we paraphrase:

During a football game between teams of local and exchange students at the University of International Business and Economics, a Norwegian student, after scoring, went over to the opposing team’s sideline, took off his shirt and blurted obscenities to the cheerleaders. When the referee learned of this incident, the student in question promptly received a red card, at which point, the student went into a rage: Made obscene gestures towards the referee, took off his shirt and shorts and displayed his rear end in protest. Chaos ensued and the game was called off.

Sounded to us like a typical soccer, oops, football game.

Anyhow, cooler heads did prevail, the exchange student, along with his teammates, tried to apologize to the opposing team after the game had been called off, but to no avail. The team drafted a letter of apology the same night and delivered it to the university. Thus far, the school has made no decisions other than to promise a “serious look”, and to investigate if warranted “harsh punishment”.

For his part, the Norwegian student did sound genuinely contrite in an interview with the journalist who broke the story and offered to do “anything and everything” for a chance at forgiveness. If posts by his peers, in the university bulletin board are any indication, forgiveness doesn’t seem to be in the offing … for now.

The school is set to decide on his fate in the next several days, and our colleagues at the Beijing bureau are monitoring the situation 24/7 and will bring you any update as soon as it breaks (by that we mean whenever we read it on the web somewhere else). Stay tuned!