Dong competing in the Sydney Games

Five golds, two silvers and four bronzes – the performance of Chinese athletes at the Vancouver Games has been nothing but outstanding during the celebration of Chinese New Year. But back home, sports officials in Beijing are fumbling, as a bronze medal the Chinese gymnastic team won at the 2000 Sydney Olympics could be stripped soon.

As gymnastics officials may have helped Chinese athletes falsify birth documentations just like the football and basketball teams have been doing in the country, it looks they forgot to remind the players that they should keep lying.

The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) posted their ruling last Saturday on its Web site. Excerpt below:

In the case of Dong Fangxiao, the Executive Committee constituted that there was a violation to the FIG Statutes and Regulations. Consequently, the results obtained by Dong Fangxiao at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games have been cancelled. The FIG Executive Committee decision was forwarded to the IOC Executive Board with the recommendation to withdraw the Bronze medal obtained by the Chinese Team including the results of Dong Fangxiao in Sydney. In addition, the FIG Executive Committee pronounced the cancellation of all results obtained by Dong Fangxiao at the 34th Artistic Gymnastics World Championships 1999 in Tianjin (CHN), of all results obtained at the FIG World Cup Series 1999 – 2000 and at the Artistic Gymnastics 2000 World Cup Final in Glasgow (GBR) The costs of the disciplinary procedure are awarded to the Chinese Gymnastics Association.

The Committee decided that in the case of Yang Yun the concrete and objective evidence available is insufficient to prove that the birth date indicated on the official documents was falsified. Ms. Yang Yun is awarded with a warning for the declaration she made during the interview with CCTV5. The only mention of age in this case was on a television interview. The costs of the disciplinary procedure are awarded to the Chinese Gymnastics Association.

Should the punishment be made by the International Olympic Committee, it can kind of prove that the Chinese gymnastic team lied to the world, also putting the results at the Beijing Games highly questionable. And now the Chinese Gymnastics Association claims the evidence held by the FIG is unconvincing.

“We believe that to date, there is no sufficient evidence to prove that there were problems with Dong Fangxiao’s age in 1999 and 2000, therefore we feel great regret toward the FIG’s punishment decision,” a staffer of the association said last Saturday and later put their statement on its Web site.

The whole thing left us with a comical situation that while there’s evidence suggests the players were under age when they competed in the Olympics, without reliable help from sports science, it seems these young ladies can never get caught by lying.

And the problem in China is, if the players do get caught here, like the CBA players we’ve mentioned earlier (also see here and here), they face little punishment according to China’s sports law.

Call me a pessimist, but unless the new licensing system implemented by the FIG is super cool, it looks very unlikely that the age fraud shall be gone from here soon. Let’s hope not to continue the talk after the London Games.

Update 1: In an interview with China Youth Daily, Luo Chaoyi, director of Gymnastics Administrative Center under the General Administration of Sport, the top governing body of Chinese sport, said the age of Dong Fangxiao is her personal matter and the fact that Dong’s age had been shifted 3 yrs younger after her retirement was Dong and her family’s own practice. (According to the FIG’s findings, Dong registered a birth date of January 20, 1983 at Sydney but when accredited to act as “secretary” at vault at the 2008 Beijing Games, had declared her birth date as January 23, 1986.)

Links and Sources:

• The FIG: Sanctions pronounced!
• msnbc: IOC: No proof China cheated in gymnastics
• AP: China expresses regret over gymnastics punishment
• Time: Can Science Tell a Gymnast’s Age?
• China Youth Daily via NetEase: Dong Fangxiao’s age fraud a personal practice (in Chinese)

Photo: NetEase

Deng Linlin from Anhui won the gold medal at the women’s gymnastics individual all-around finals at China’s 11th National Games on Saturday.

Deng, listed as “born on April 21, 1992,” played last year at the Beijing Games and won Team All-around Champion along with He Kexin, Li Shanshan and three other gymnasts.

1. Juguo Rules the Games 

51 golds, 21 silvers and 28 bronzes, a total 100 medals. China for the first time surpassed the US in the number of golds won most golds in an Olympic Games by sticking to its juguo or whole-nation sports regime. People at the General Administration of Sport of China, the governing body of China’s sports, had since been discussing about proliferating their successful juguo model into a more popular sport, football.

2. Lin Miaoke, Blackout and the Opening Ceremony

The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games will be long remembered not only by its pyrotechnics and drum show, but also a girl named Lin Miaoke, who lip-synced when singing ‘Ode to the Motherland.’  “The reason was for the national interest,” said Chen Qigang, the musical director of the opening ceremony in a radio interview. Chen added that the decision of doing lip-syncing was made at the highest level. It goes without saying that whoever knew about this decision before the ceremony were cool about it, even the parents of Lin Miaoke and Yang Peiyi, the real singer, for whatever reasons that I can’t understand. 

Chen’s so-called ‘national interest’ did scare me, along with the blackout struck our community in Beijing on August 8, 15 minutes after the show began. I saw my neighbors helplessly talking to one other in the alley and guiltily drove to my friend’s. No one told us we were to have a blackout, and no one even came to us to explain what had happened after August 8. A Caijing article later showed that at least 15 pathetic residential communities in Chaoyang District had blackout that night, together contributing to the ‘national interest’ unknowingly. The lip-syncing girl at least had a shot of rejecting doing good to the ‘national interest,’ we didn’t. And that’s only in Beijing, the capital city.

3. Age Of Chinese Women Gymnasts Questioned

Chinese women gymnasts, He Kexin and Jiang Yuyuan, were questioned about their ages after winning golds at the Games. It all began with Stryde’s hack of Chinese websites. All evidence disappeared, ID cards and passports provided. Sorry American girls, you did really well in the games but Chinese did better, if not in the indoor stadium. 

4. Yi Jianlian and CBA Age Scandals

Ages of 22 CBA players were found to have been changed their ages before the new season in the new yearbook issued by CBA, the governing body of Chinese basketball. The association then told media that there’re actually 26 players changed their ages, submitting all the info to FIBA and acting like they had no idea about the situation before. Early this December, a reporter at the Chinese-language version of Sports Illustrated found evidence suggesting that Yi Jianlian, New Jersey Nets forward, is 3 years older than he claimed to be.

5. Horse Gambling in Wuhan

Some 3 million jobs and 100 billion Chinese yuan annual sales sound so enticing that gambling, after nearly 60-year ban in China, reappeared in a different form of packaging. And looks like it will be welcomed even more by the government under the current economic circumstances. 

6. China Bowl Canceled by NFL Again

From Hongda’s withdrawal from Formula One to MLB and NFL’s job cuts, sports industry was so much struck by the slumping economy this winter. China bowl was once again canceled by NFL and New England Patriots closed its office in Beijing.

7. Li Ning Lit the Olympic Flame

Li Ning’s lighting of the Olympic cauldron at the closing ceremony is no doubt the biggest ambush marketing in Olympic history. Although not an official Olympic sponsor, the Chinese sportswear manufacturer must have sold more sneakers thanks to the incomparable publicity it enjoyed at the ceremony. Li Ning penned a contract with Los Angeles Clippers’ Baron Davis this November, a branding move that can be translated as ‘we don’t care much about the North American market.’

8. Fenglu Club Vs. CBA

It’s sad after so much preparation and promises and Fenglu still hadn’t gotten what they wanted, a seat at Chinese Basketball Association, China’s top basketball league. “Geographical balance” might be the weirdest explanation one can ever think of, and unfortunately that’s all CBA could offer for the club.

9. Liu Xiang’s Last Minute Withdrawal         

For millions of Chinese fans, Liu Xiang is simply a source of national pride, the same complex Chinese people had towards China women’s national volleyball team in the 1980s, after claiming five straight major titles. Liu’s last minute withdrawal at the Beijing Games were widely sympathized by fans except for the anger from the scalpers. Liu, 110-meter hurdler, had been covered almost everyday by Chinese media after winning gold in 2004 Athens Olympics. Some said he was hurt not by injury, but the overzealous Chinese media.

10. Chinese Football Out for 2010 World Cup

Chinese football fans could not be downhearted more this year. The national men’s football team was eliminated in the 2010 World Cup Qualifiers this June and lost whatever match they could lose in the rest of the year. Yesterday on December 30, Wei Shaohui, the manager of the men’s team and an official at Chinese Football Association, apologized in a press conference for the poor performance of the team with his theory about potency, “we’ll be potent again when the performance gets better.”

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We stumbled upon a fascinating post today on Asia Basket. Arthur Volbert, a US-based basketball writer who’s been closely following Chinese basketball, found that ages of 22 CBA players have been changed at the start of season 2008/2009. Below are some excerpts:

For Jiangsu, Tang Zhengdong went from being born in 1984 to 1982, confirming longtime rumors than he was older than his listed age. Others who became older were Han Shuo, Yi Li, Hu Xuefeng, Meng Da and Fang Hui.

For Liaoning, National Team member Zhang Qingpeng went from being born in 1985 to being born in 1981. Yang Ming, Gu Liye, Lu Wei and Liu Xiangtao also became older.

For other teams, there are the normal ups and downs with ages that happens in China. Guangdong’s Du Feng, a member of the National Team, went from being born in 1981 to being born in 1982. He keeps switching from one to the other and back, for some unfathomable reason.

Are we surprised by the news? Not at all. Your correspondent at CSR happened to be the schoolmate of two CBA players, one at Shanghai Sharks (上海大鲨鱼队) and the other at Bayi Rockets (八一火箭队), who both were officially listed last year by CBA as four years younger than we know. The two players are unfortunately not on Arthur’s list.

If someone digs, age-scandal stories of this kind can be found in almost every soon-to-be-nationalised football clubs in the country. The reason no one gives a hoot about it is because Chinese football has been lying there in a perennial slumber for so long. And oh, by Chinese football we mean men’s national football team. If you look at the performances of Chinese U17 or U20 men’s team you’ll find they’re actually not as bad as their elders, the U17 team even made it to the quarter-finals of FIFA U-17 World Cup in 2005 in Peru. This suggests that the pace, strength, stamina of these ‘boys’ outruned their foreign peers at the time. The bad news for Chinese footballers is their peers do grow, and we all know what can be expected later.

What Arthur found reminds us of the debate over ages in the Beijing Olympic Games, where two Chinese women gymnasts, He Kexin (何可欣) and Jiang Yuyuan (江钰源), were questioned whether their were below 16, the age women gymnasts are considered eligible to compete in the Games. “The girls are so little, so young,” said Mary Lou Retton, the Olympic all-around gymnastics champion at the 1984 Los Angeles Games to the New York Times when speaking of He. “They said she was 16, but I don’t know.”

Well, we don’t know either. But chances are the Chinese Gymnastics Association do, and they told media that the young ladies are old enough. We genuinely hope He and Jiang are not like those basketball and football players, otherwise they not only cheated their competitors but also themselves, and the gold medals they won will always remind them of what happened this summer.

Sources and Reads:

• Asia Basket: 22 CBA Players Change Birth Years
• The New York Times: Ruling Backs Chinese Gymnasts
• Sports Law Blog: Yi Jianlian’s Age, NBA Employment, and Immigration Law

Photo: Baidu Baike

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