The 2019 European Artistic Gymnastics Championships took on a peculiar turn when it came to presenting the victors with their hard-earned awards.
When the medalists went to the podium, the European Union of Gymnastics’ (UEG) mascot, Luigi the Monkey, personally awarded them with bananas.
This development, however, apparently did not sit well with a number of netizens who began pondering whether the image of a black athlete – specifically, Melanie de Jesus dos Santos who won gold — being given a banana might contain some kind of racist subtext.