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An official Chinese document unearthed today provides further evidence in the ongoing scandal that China's gold winning women's gymnastic girls are just that—girls.

The document, first discovered by a search engine hacker who goes by the alias of stryde.hax lists birthdates and hometowns for hundreds of China’s gymnasts.

The document, a spreadsheet titled “2006 Nationwide Gymnastics Registration Table,” is dated February 20, 2006 and lists two members of China's women’s gymnastics, Yang Yilin and He Kexin, as being only 14 years old. To compete, a gymnast is required to turn 16 in the year the Games are held.

Epoch Times has unearthed similar document for 2005 on the same government server through Baidu cache, which also indicated same birthdates for He and Yang showing them 14 this year.

The two gymnasts claimed four medals in total. He Kexin won a gold in the uneven bars and Yang won bronze medals in the uneven bars and in the overall individual competition. Both gymnasts were also part of China's gold medal winning women's team.

According to the document, He Kexin's birthday is January 1, 1994, while Yang Yilin’s birthday is Aug 26, 1993, making her 15 next week.

The cached document, which has been removed from the website of China’s official sports administration, reads in line 811 (with column headers in brackets): “[name] Yang Yilin, [gender] female, [born] 1993-8-26, [hometown] Guangdong Province, Guangzhou City, [registering organization] Guangdong Province, [notes] confirmed.”

And on line 1040: “[name] He Kexin, [gender] female, [born] 1994-1-1, [hometown], [registering organization] Wuhan City.”

The incriminating document was found in the Baidu search engine's cache. Baidu bills itself as China's own search engine, and is widely used there. The original document has been removed from http://www.sport.gov.cn/ , a server run by the General Administration of Sport of China.

When contacted by the Epoch Times, a BOCOG Legal Department representative denied the allegations. The General Office, Sports Department and Media and Communications branches of BOCOG could not be reached for a comment.

By removing the document, it appears that someone has attempted to bury the evidence. Indeed, if these documents are accurate, then China's Communist regime has issued passports to the girls with fake birth dates, allowing them to compete illegally.

Hacker stryde.hax claims to have repeated the search on Google and have found the same document, absent He Kexin's name. The Epoch Times repeated the search on Google hours later with no results.

"Google's cached copy of the spreadsheet does not contain He Kexin's age record, and Baidu's does," said stryde.hax in a blog post. "This does not necessarily imply that Google allowed its data to be rewritten by Chinese censors, but the possibility does present itself."

Google's New York office has not responded to repeated phone calls and emails from the Epoch Times.

This latest document affirms previous media reports of the athletes' birth dates. The Epoch Times has found these same birth dates in several state-run media reports and on other government websites  – for example a now-removed article on the Xinhua news agency website dated Nov. 3, 2007, which is still accessible via the Google cache.

A web search on Baidu.com, entering the names and birthdates provided by this document, yields further references.

Attention will now be focused on how the IOC responds to these accusations, which involve an apparent breach of the Olympic Charter. The discovery of the document has become a hot discussion topic on Slashdot.org, a popular technology website.

Following these reports, the IOC has now asked the International Gymnastics Federation to investigate the ages of the Chinese gymnasts.

At the time of writing, the document in question is still on Baidu's cache of the original page.

For the original page (now removed) click here.
For the Baidu cache click here.

Last Updated
Sep 18, 2008