Chinese Gymnasts Aged 14, Official Document Shows

Jan Jekielek & Anna Yang, Epoch Times Staff Update: Please see our updated article on the Chinese gymnasts' age scandal. An official Chinese government 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.

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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 Google caches of the documents have been removed. The original document has been removed from [url=http://www.sport.gov.cn/]http://www.sport.gov.cn/[/url], a server run by the General Administration of Sport of China. 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 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." 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, yield further references. Attention will now be focused on how the IOC responds to these accusations, which involve a breach of the Olympic Charter. The discovery of the document has become a hot discussion topic on Slashdot.org, a popular technology website. At the time of writing, the document in question is still on Baidu's caches of the original pages, The Epoch Times has confirmed: For the original page (now removed) click here. For the Baidu cache click here.