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Hacker Uncovers Chinese Olympic Fraud
SkeptOlympics writes "A new chapter in the ongoing controversy surrounding China's women's gymnastics team opened today, as search engine hacker stryde.hax found surviving copies of official registration documents issued by China's General Administration of Sport of China. The incriminating documents, expunged by censors from the official site and from Google's document cache, still appear in the document translation cache of Chinese search giant Baidu, here (1) and here (2), showing the age of one of China's gold medal winning gymnasts to be 14 instead of 16, the minimum age for competition presented on her government-issued passport. Now that official government documentation is available, how long will the IOC be able to keep a lid on this scandal?" I imagine the answer is "Forever."
This is actually incredibly likely
See http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/peter_foster/blog/2008/08/20/the_ioc_plays_appeaser_in_beijing for recent prior art.
It's to do with the safety of the competitors (underdeveloped bones etc.) as gymnastics takes much more of a toll on your body than swimming (being exceedingly hig. I would wager being younger, and lighter, also helps on things like the Asymmetric Bars.
I am NaN
The younger you are, the smaller you tend to be. If you are smaller, you can spin/rotate faster (pure physics there). Additionally, you are more flexible, so you can perform certain maneuvers that get more difficult as you get older. There also is a "fear" issue that plays a small part where a younger person, not having the same number of opportunities to fall and hurt themselves, will be more fearless than an older person who has been banged up a bit. Women's gymnastics isn't really about strength, so age doesn't help you. Whereas in other sports, men's gymnastics even, the stronger you are, the better you probably will be, and the older you are, the stronger you tend to be.
There's a minimum age because FIG (Federation Internationale de Gymnastique) implemented one in 1997:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_gymnastics
Why? Well, it's not conclusive, but this article has some good reasons:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080817014559AAZVAvK
Most of the girls on the Chinese team don't look like they've finished puberty - childish faces, no hips, scrawny. Even for Chinese, these athletes would be extreme cases if they were even close to their 'official' age. Cheng Fei is the only one that does. I can't wait to see what they look like in 3 or 4 years.. I guarantee they will all be taller, heavier, and curvier.
While that is probably true, most adult women in China look young compared to what we Westerners are used to. (I lived there for a few years, and I always thought that many of my adult coworkers looked like they were 16 or 17) They are just, in general, shorter, thinner, and less curvey than their western counterparts. So it's hard to judge.
Even though you have tons of sports in the Olympics, each sport is different, especially in culture.
In order to groom a good gymnast you have to start very young and you have to practice constantly, training for much of her life. You must be physically strong, flexible, have incredible coordination and balance, have low weight and low body fat and be relatively fearless. The types of things female gymnasts are asked to do are best performed by teenage girls who have made a life long career out of gymnastics. The problem is that once you realize this, you press gymnasts to train harder and harder, faster and faster. You get into situations were girls train too much, ignore schooling, get injuries because they push too hard, begin to suffer from bolemia and anorexia, etc. To top it off, you typically only get 1 shot at olympic gold, if at all, because in 4 years your "washed up" because the next girl who comes along is the new star and at 20 you can't do the same things you can at 16. At that young age, all you want to do is get your moment in the spotlight, make your coach and your parents happy, and get your pony. You aren't thinking about your long term future, and most gymnasts don't have a future in gymnastics outside of their teen years. If you look at this culture, women's gymnastics no longer looks like such a pretty sport.
At least in men's gymnastics, they can attend at least two olympics, because their events are based more on strength and men can continue to get stronger past their teen years
Just to paint a little more broad picture, look at swimming this year. There's a 40 year old woman swimming for the american team this year. Phelps has been in two and could be in three olympics. Swimmers train hard, but in general they can get better as they get older, as Phelps did, but gymnasts peak early. When have you seen a woman gymnast in more than 1 olympics? When have you seen a 24 year old female gymnast, much less a 40 year old one?
The point of the rule is a stop gap to prevent downward pressure on the average age of a gymnast, and allow them to grow up at least a little bit in the hopes they can make better decisions for themselves, and so that coaches and countries don't start pushing 12 year olds as gymnasts. A 14 year old is a little more fearless than a 16 year old... in a very bad way. One bad decision could cause severe injury, and pushing a girl that young will have lasting effects on her life, mostly bad. I would not put it past communist regimes like China to have a state run program where they don't care about their girls and create a program which churns out 12-14 year old world class gymnasts who in turn are discarded with severe emotional and physical problems later in life.
So in short, it's their to protect the girls from themselves and everyone else who would push them too hard to early. Personally, I'd want the limit higher, because calling those gymnasts "women" is downright upsetting to me, and they still start incredibly young for a fleeting chance at a bit of stardom.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
A couple of elderly women (70+) are being reducated for wanting to protest their eviction and their sin was timing their application during the Olympics. That and the incident where their poster golden boy broke down from too much training and his coach said the extreme pressure from the regime was to blame convinces me there is a god up there and he was looking after me for I was not born in China.
Yes, I am being melodramatic and I think it's apt.
This is old news. There were already some discussions regarding this on various Chinese forums. People have dug up webpages showing reports of her age as 14, all coming from the same source, namingly the "6-city competition". Insiders said it's actually the local gymnastics team which He belongs to that forged her age as 14, in order to get the highly skilled olympian into this event,which has a underage group meant for young gymnastists under 15. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how this new discovery of hidden spreadsheets is going to fit in the story.
Certainly worth modding up IMHO. She won despite her age, not because she took drugs or anything. I think she deserves her medal. The only scandal here are the documents, not her competing.
I think you're confused.
More like she won because of her age.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/sports/olympics/s_583045.html
Some coaches believe younger gymnasts have an advantage over older ones, because they have greater flexibility and a higher strength-to-weight ratio.
Elaine Jewart, owner of Jewart's Gymnastics in the North Hills, said the bodily changes that come with the onset of puberty affect a gymnast's center of gravity and strength-to-weight ratio, putting strain on the body.
Younger gymnasts' bodies are less susceptible to overuse injuries because they haven't been training as long as older gymnasts, according to Penn State women's gymnastics coach Steve Shephard.
In addition to the physiological advantages, younger gymnasts have a psychological edge.
"An athlete at that age has not had as many serious injuries as older ones," said Jason Butts, an assistant women's gymnastics coach at West Virginia University. "They're not as subject to fear from injuries or the knowledge of what they're actually doing."
And there's a ton of articles saying the exact same thing.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It's to do with the safety of the competitors (underdeveloped bones etc.) as gymnastics takes much more of a toll on your body than swimming (being exceedingly hig. I would wager being younger, and lighter, also helps on things like the Asymmetric Bars.
If my recollection of Sanjay Gupta's comments on CNN is of any value, I believe the issue is the opposite, namely that underdeveloped bones confer a real advantage to the athlete (they're more "bendy" in addition to being "lighter").
Young competitors are more capable of performing flips and spins and such, but more likely to get injured in competition. This rule was agreed upon by the international gymnastics community due to such injuries.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Does it really matter? Do younger gymnasts have a significant advantage over gymnasts a couple of years older?
In fact it DOES matter. Younger gymnasts do in fact have an advantage. Not to be crude, but puberty is death for an olympic gymnast. Growing boobs and a butt completely throws off the body's center of gravity necessary to do a lot of the tumbling. Thats why you almost never see an olympic gymnast over 21.
but the jr. events are much lower difficulty in order to have a chance to be competitive, and the jr. events also restrict the difficulties to protect the kids competing. Olympic competition is a lot more dangerous due to the need to execute difficult maneuvers in order to be competitive.
Then you really need to peek outside your door. Maybe you haven't noticed, under Bush's tenure: extraordinary rendition, torture, a $3 trillion+ war of aggression, colossal hypocrisy, illegal wiretapping, disgusting cronyism and profiteering, a million dead civilians, galloping environmental destruction ... Need I go on. Bush (and his cabal) has earned the absolute hatred of every civilised individual on the planet. We wait for their Nuremberg.
you had me at #!
The minimum age rule applies specifically to women's gymnastics and it was implemented largely because of injuries. Basically they decided that countries going for younger and younger girls in gymnastics competitions and having them break and pull things and permanently screw up their joints was a bad thing, so they implemented a minimum age rule.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
It's the new scoring system.
You can get more points for a difficult routine that you perform with a few steps/wobbles than a simpler routing you perform perfectly. So, a double backflip with a twist, ending with a step will give you more points that a "regular" double backflip without a step.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
While we are being offtopic...
What two wars are we fighting? I don't see any declared hostility with any nation.
If I shot your dog (with a howitzer), claiming having been after a particular flea (Osama bin Fleaden), would that make your dog any less mincemeat?
There is a big word beginning with an H and ending with an Y that fits your statement perfectly, sir. Prefixed with "blatant".
We have introduced age limits because it is bad for the physical and mental development of younger athletes to compete at such a high level.
It looks like China broke the rules, and the gold needs to be stripped from the effected athletes.
No, but some are doing time for it.
You just don't hear about it.
If the press is stifled in some way how do you think you are going to hear about it?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You misunderstand the issue - being 14 is an advantage, not a disadvantage. The Chinese begin training their gymnasts at age 3, and their peak performance age is generally 12-14; not much older than when they start menstruating. Hips widen, BMI increases, etc. The physiological changes that occur after this age generally make it more difficult for female gymnasts to perform these acrobatics.
No. Trainers know that training at that level is very risky and so they put it off as long as possible. You would ramp up your training 6 months to a year out. Prior to that you would work on all of the parts of a routine but not actually do the routine. They dismount into pools of foam blocks and things like that.
Because in swimming, there is no advantage to being younger (in fact, there may be a disadvantage, in that you are shorter and not as heavily muscled). In gymnastics, there is an advantage to being smaller. It allows you to performs the maneuvers far more easily. The age of 16 may be arbitrary (though it will probably have the effect of weeding out most pre-pubescent competitors), but it does level the playing field.
Rhapsody in Numbers
>>It looks like China broke the rules, and the gold needs to be stripped from the effected athletes.
China was also cheating in TKD, with their judges refusing to score good players that would face Chinese athletes next:
http://olympics.thestar.com/2008/article/481950
http://www.cbc.ca/olympics/taekwondo/story/2008/08/19/f-olympics-taekwondo-gonda.html
http://www.tsn.ca/olympics/story/?id=246955&lid=headline&lpos=secStory_main
http://www.sportsnet.ca/olympics/2008/08/20/olympic_taekwondo_gonda/
It was proved that North Korea altered official documents to allow underage girls to participate in world gymnastic competitions and they are currently bared from participation because of their falsification of documents.
Much like this proof should involve the striping of the Chinese medals and a bar on participation by Chinese competitors in international gymnastics should be imposed, probably in the 4 year range.
There's more to it than that. You start at 1, and increment every New Year. So someone who's 14 in Western age could be 16 in traditional age.
Whoever is arguing that kids are not allowed into the Olympics because of this ridiculous notion of 'destruction of their bodies' is clearly not informed about the age, at which the gymnasts start their training and when they are allowed to compete in various local, regional, national and international (like world) events. How many medals must a gymnast have before they are even allowed to the Olympics in gymnastics? More often than not, these 'kids' already are world champions.
I and many of my colleagues at work (who are mostly Chinese) agree that the Chinese girls are definitely between 12 and 14 years of age, not anywhere near 16.
You can't handle the truth.
Well, Los Angeles turned a profit because they didn't undertake the massive new construction that most Olympic venues do. I think I read that there was basically two structures built for the Olympics. Everything else was done in pre-existing stadiums/facilities.
A more reasonable group of them would realise that the entire native population of North America at the time wasn't even close to equal to the number of people killed in Maos purges.
China's policies have resulted in the deaths of between 10 and 100 million people. After you factor out the spread of disease from Europe in the Americas, which was tragic, but not malicious for the most part(Germ theory hadn't been invented yet, though apparently Cortez figured out something was killing the Aztecs and gave them smallpox infected blankets), there simply weren't that many natives left in north america. It's safe to say between 100,000 and 11,000,000.
It's been a long time.