I caught a little of a CCTV profile of China's star gymnast He Kexin over the recent New Year holiday.
The young lady appears to have filled out quite considerably. Maybe it's just a little layer of winter insulation. Maybe she'd been eating a lot over the holiday period. Maybe she's been taking a rest from training for a while.
But she did appear to be becoming a little bit of a porker. Taller and fuller figured, too. Perhaps she's finally hit puberty. There is, of course, always speculation that these young female gymnasts are given drugs to delay puberty and keep them small and light, although the rigorous training regime alone is apt to do that. When these girls do finally 'grow up', they grow up fast.
He Kexin, I would say, is growing up. She's now starting to look like the 16-year-old China claimed she was a year ago. Almost. Well.... starting to look like the just-turned-15-year-old she actually is.
The IOC was eventually shamed into launching an "investigation", but I never heard the outcome of that. Has the story really been forgotten, hushed up, "disappeared"?
I just tried to find out, and.... guess what? A search on Google News produces only ONE return for He Kexin. And that one probably only slipped through the filter because it's in Polish.
A regular Web search produces considerably more returns; but, seemingly, none of them are dated later than 23rd August last year. Has Ms He really done nothing of note since then? Has there been no further public discussion of the "age controversy"? I find that hard to believe. No, I fear that we are still seeing blanket censorship of this topic within China. (I need to find myself a better proxy; FoxyProxy no longer seems to be cutting it.)
I would be grateful to anyone who could send me some more up-to-date news on this.
By the way, I put "controversy" in quotation marks because I don't think there's any controversy about it at all. Check out the excellent Stryde Hax for overwhelming proof that He Kexin was underage when she competed in the Olympics last year, that her documents were altered to make her appear older, and that Chinese government officials have repeatedly lied about it ever since. Oh yes, and tried to pull every incriminating document from the Internet as soon as it was exposed. And tried to suppress domestic discussion - or even awareness - of the issue by censoring the Net.
Other female gymnasts in the Chinese team last year were also underage. It would appear that conspiring to fake the age of female gymnasts has been a standard government policy here for some time. The only new wrinkle in the He Kexin story is the massive attempt to cover the tracks of the deception online. Yang Yun, a medal winner on the assymetric bars at the Sydney Games in 2000, has publicly admitted to being only 14 at the time. She doesn't seem to be ashamed at this revelation, and no action has been taken against her. On the contrary, the mayor of her home town seems to consider it a matter of greater pride that she could win a medal at such a young age, blithely ignoring the fact that it was against the rules.
I have spoken before about the apparent lack of any moral qualm in the Chinese about cheating. It is one of the things I find most depressing about this country.
5 comments:
Well, still looking, but so far the most recent news I could find about it was from early October -- and that wasn't about the IOC but rather something called FIG (acronym for French "International Gymnastics Federation"). The Wall St. Journal reported on Oct. 2:
"...FIG said Wednesday it was satisfied by the evidence presented by Chinese officials. 'Originals of official documents received from the Chinese Gymnastics Association, specifically passports, identity cards and family booklets or "Household Registers," confirm the ages of the athletes,' FIG said in a statement. 'It is considered that the case is now concluded.'"
An amusing comment on the blog where I found the link to the WSJ was in verse:
I.
An adolescent girl's emboldened
To wish herself as somewhat oldened;
In later years, no plea or plot'll
Put that genie back in its bottle.
II.
The challenge grew with more incessance:
"Prove you’ve passed through juvenescence."
Giggling, they blushed, but then...
That word is funny when you’re ten.
Ha, that's excellent. Thanks, JES.
Criminally naive of the sport's governing body, though. When you know how routinely official documentation is falsified in China, you have to go beyond that and consider the welter of evidence that shows her age has been differently reported at different times. And there is lots and lots and lots of evidence to show that - until shortly before the Olympics - her age in official documents (tournament entries, national governing body registrations) - her birth date was being registered as January '94.
The Yang Yun case is even more shocking. She's admitted she lied about her age, but the IOC hasn't asked for her medal back yet.
It's yet another example, I fear, of people grovelling to China, afraid to risk upsetting the nascent superpower.
I wonder if that poem was the work of my drinking buddy The Weeble. Sounds like his style.
Then again, it might even be mine; although I have no recollection of it whatsoever (never drink and post!).
I'm particularly gratified to see the "10-year-old" reference. I was beginning to think that only I knew that joke.
The He Kexin scandal also rubbed me up the wrong way - perhaps a little more than it should have done.
This comment resonates perfectly with my own thoughts:
"...the apparent lack of any moral qualm in the Chinese about cheating. It is one of the things I find most depressing about this country."
'The ends justify the means' has never been more appropriately applied. I love the way some of my former students react angrily to being called on their cheating and plagiarism for causing them to lose face. Unbelievable!
A Chinese commenter (a real rarity for me - I don't put myself out there for the fen qing hordes by leaving my URL on The Duck - on the earlier post on cheating I linked to here suggested that there was a stronger moral framework to Chinese life back in the Maoist days, and that the 'win by any means' mentality was a fairly recent phenomenon, a product of the race to modernise and to embrace capitalism/materialism.
Interesting idea, but I was sceptical.
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