Thoughts on the Chinese Women's Gymnastics Age Dispute

With all the talk about whether or not athletes on the Chinese women's gymnastics team are too young to compete, I decided to do a search of my own and see what turned up.  The articles in English tend to make it sound like it takes some serious sleuthing to find evidence the athletes are too young, but a simple web search in Chinese yields plenty of incriminating evidence.

My personal take on the issue is that regardless of ages, the Chinese team performed better in team gymnastics and probably would have won even if their athletes were all at least 16.  The U.S. women had some pretty bad mistakes, though I was rooting for them.  The Chinese women deserved the gold, as did 楊威 in the men's all-around gymnastics last night, and I applaud all of them.  I agree with Dan Wetzel that the Karolyis' whining doesn't do much for sportsmanship and probably just betrays their own desire to use younger girls on their own teams ("Karolyis’ sour grapes makes bad whine").

What strikes me as comical though is the fact that the Chinese government (issuing their passports), Olympic committee, and gymnastics team could perpetrate a lie with such persistent boldness.  It irks me a little that they count on the language barrier for protection and to provide relative insularity from the Western press.  Here are a couple items turned up by a Yahoo! search:

Here's an article from 3 November 2007 listing 何可欣's age as 13 in a competition:
城運會 明日之星亮晶晶

The same article direct from the 新華 news agency has been taken down from their site, but the cached version can be found here:
第六屆城運會十大新星（配圖）

Here's one from 2 December 2007 that presents 何可欣 as the 13-year-old secret weapon of the women's team that will enable them to beat the U.S. team.  If this article is hosted on servers in China, my guess is the government will delete it if it gets too much attention.
李小鵬打造新利器狀態良好 13歲小丫成女隊秘密武器
李小鵬打造新利器狀態良好 13歲小丫成女隊秘密武器

Here's a discussion of a Chinese translation of one of the articles disputing the gymnasts' ages. One comment in particular sums up most of them, "It doesn't matter if she's too young, just as long as they get the gold medal."
中国奥运体操运动员年龄是太小了吗？

EDIT:
Some more discussions:
http://comment.2008.sina.com.cn/comment/skin/default.html?channel=ty&newsid=461-5-203483
http://comment.2008.sina.com.cn/comment/skin/default.html?channel=ty&newsid=461-5-202662
More people in China are saying that this is bringing shame to the country. Some even calling for the Chinese gymnastics coach to be fired.

EDIT:
图文-第六届城运会十大新星 何可欣打动国家队教头

This entry was posted on Thursday, 14 August 2008 at 2:22pm and is filed under Facebook Notes, Sports. Feel free to leave a response. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed.