Olympic Gymnasticsgate Update: More Evidence That Gymnast Is Underage
You know, it really makes you wonder where the heads of the IOC and FIG are. Oh wait.
I don’t claim to be some sort of computer guru, and I don’t have epic haXX0r skillz, but I can read and do simple math, and even I recognize that 1994 from 2008 is not 16. Deceiver found a great page…it seems a blogger/hacker found some pretty damning evidence that He Kexin is not sixteen after all, as China so desperately wants us to believe:
In the Baidu cache, which apparently has not been hit with the scrub brush (yet), two spreadsheets published by the Chinese government on sport.gov.cn both list He Kexin’s birthday as 01-01-1994, making her 14 years old. For as long as these links work, you can access the documents directly, either using the directions and screenshots above, or these links: cache1 cache2
I do not even pretend to understand some of the technical stuff (although I am learning…I’ve taught myself things that surprise people). But even I can grasp that the Chinese government is working feverishly to remove any traces of He Kexin’s true age from the internets. The country of China is behind both athletics and news organizations, and everything that comes out of China is monitored. This is not an accident or a series of typographical errors. They know what is going out, before it goes out.
As Dawn has so astutely pointed out, there is something major wrong in the sport of gymnastics and the willingness of the Olympics to look the other way in this. There’s a problem, as she has said again, when one country is expected to adhere to the set rules, but another country can get by with breaking them just because they are the host. Oh, and then there’s that whole terrorizing your countrymen thing if they don’t toe the party line (no pun intended…well, maybe a little).
Not only is the age of more than one Chinese gymnast in question, but the subject of the judging must also come up. It was suggested during the broadcasts that some of the judges do not have the experience needed to judge gymnastics at this level, and that could account for the Chinese team receiving points even when they did things like fail to stick the landing or falling off the apparatus. Personally, I think that is a diplomatic way of saying that the Chinese team was favored in the points, because who wants to offend the Chinese? Yes, we made big mistakes…so did the Chinese.
It also occurs to me that another indicator of the young age of these girls are the mistakes in question. If they were truly of Olympic age, that would mean they would have one to two more years of national/international competition under their tiny belts than they actually do. Perhaps the mistakes were simply competitors who are unused to competing at this level. Having said that, I realize mistakes happen, even to the best and most seasoned competitor. It’s just my theory.
So many say this is just “sour grapes” because we lost so many medals to China in the Olympics. And I would repeat that this isn’t about who won what, but about following the rules as they are set forth. If the rules state that you have to be sixteen in an Olympic year, then them’s the rules, and you have to follow them. If the rules state you deduct so many tenths of a point for a mistake, then that is what should happen. Period. All athletes AND coaches (even those who’s teams are run by the state) take an Olympic oath that they will follow the rules. All anyone who truly loves sport asks is that all compeitors be subject to the same rules. What, when we solemnly swear to uphold something, those words are meaningless, as long as we do what we do in the name of national pride? When one censors the internets, claiming one thing is truth and now the corrected thing is truth, forget that first thing…where does that leave us?
What is this post really about? I don’t really feel that it’s about the gymnastics age limit, or even really about whether fraud occurred. At this point, I believe that any reasonable observer already understands that age records have been forged. This story now is really about Internet censorship, the act of removing evidence while at the same time claiming that the evidence is wrong. For the first time I watched search records shift under my feet like sand, facts draining down a hole in the Internet. Will this stand?
A bunch of bloggers and hackers have found what the IOC and FIG swear do not exist.
You can follow GlossLip’s continuing coverage of this scandal here.
UPDATE: The IOC has ordered the FIG to investigate this matter further. ‘Bout time.
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This age controversy was only stirred up by some US media because of jealousy and ignorance. Now even HACKER got involved in this campaign. How desperate! Since when hacker discovery of some faulty government web pages can be treated as solid “evidence”? How painful is losing the gold medal race!
It’s so convenient to denounce Chinese government media at one time, then treated it as the most authoritative at another (100% correctness?!). Those posted age information was just the mistakes made by some lazy or careless Chinese reporters or web page creators. How about those Chinese web sites reported correct age information? They were conveniently ignored by the US media.
Here we observe vividly the double standards US media has over China. When an American is accused of doing some doping thing, etc, they ask for being considered as innocent unless proved otherwise. Now, they just stir up this media hysteria and presumed Chinese guilty unless proved otherwise.
An old video circulated on Chinese web sites clearly showed that those girls were recruited when China was awarded Olympics and it mentioned they would be 16 years old in 2008.
BTW, many Chinese girls do look very young comparing to Westerners, and some even appear younger than most other Chinese girls. If you don’t know that, you have not seen enough. To most Americans, all Chinese Gymnasts in the team look like under 16 years old, not just those three being suspected (Japanese female Gymnasts look very under-aged too). There are Chinese girls in their 20s look like 14-year-old to even Chinese.
Comment by Tony Su — August 22, 2008 @ 6:33 pm
Nice. You did your job. However, we in the USA are allowed to think for ourselves and form our own conclusions and question things that seem out of order to us. And no…I do not think all the girls on the Chinese gymnastics team look under sixteen, just a few. If you know the characteristics to look for then it isn’t too hard.
I do give you an A for effort, though.
Comment by k — August 23, 2008 @ 12:52 am