No more tolerance for age falsification
China will not tolerate age falsification and has enforced stringent checks upon its 70-athlete delegation to the inaugural
Youth Olympics in Singapore next month, a top sports official was quoted on Thursday as saying.
China has long been accused of athlete age falsification.
Earlier this year, its women's gymnastics team from the 2000 Sydney
Olympics was stripped of its bronze medal after an investigation
found Dong Fangxiao was only 14 at the time. Gymnasts must turn at
least 16 during an Olympic year to be eligible to compete.
The delegation going to Singapore will be "very clean and
transparent," Cai Zhenhua, vice-president of the State General
Administration of Sport, was quoted as saying in the official China
Daily newspaper.
"We've scrutinised every athlete's age in the delegation for the
Youth Olympic Games to make sure there is no one going to Singapore
with a fake age," Cai was quoted as saying.
Authorities checked six forms of ID for the athletes who range
in age from 14 to 18: birth certificates, national ID cards,
passports, domestic athlete registration cards and domestic and
international authentication for competitions, the report said.
Those under age 16 have also undergone bone-age analyses.
The furor over Dong's age was embarrassing for China's
government, which runs a massive training program aimed at churning
out Olympic champions.
China never said who was responsible for
faking Dong's age, though the country's top gymnastics official has
said the athlete and her family must have been behind it - though
it's unlikely a young athlete or her parents could forge official
documents.
The issue drew worldwide attention in 2008, when media reports
and Internet records suggested some of the girls on China's
gold-medal-winning Beijing Olympics team could have been as young
as 14. They were later cleared by the International Gymnastics
Federation.
A total of 3 500 athletes from 205 countries will take part in
the Youth Olympics, founded by the International Olympic Committee
in part to interest more young people in participating in sports.
All 26 sports from the Summer Games will be represented in
Singapore, but not all events within each sport. Some sports will
be staged in a different format. Basketball, for example, will be a
3-on-3, half-court game played over three five-minute periods.