Here's a picture of Dong, from the 2000 Games.
Posted on 04/28/2010 8:50:27 AM PDT by darkangel82
China Loses Gymnastics Bronze Medal 2000 Team Bronze Goes To USA STEPHEN WILSON, AP Sports Writer
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- China was stripped of a bronze medal from the 2000 Sydney Olympics on Wednesday for fielding an underage female gymnast, with the women's team medal now going to the United States.
The International Olympic Committee acted after investigations by the sport's governing body determined that Dong Fangxiao was only 14 at the 2000 Games. Gymnasts must turn 16 during the Olympic year to be eligible.
Dong's results from Sydney were nullified in February by the International Gymnastics Federation. Because her scores contributed to China winning the team bronze, the FIG recommended the IOC take the medal back.
As expected, the IOC executive board upheld the request and formally stripped the medal on the first day of a two-day meeting in Dubai.
The U.S. women, who had been fourth, move up to the bronze.
(Excerpt) Read more at channel4000.com ...
They really moved fast on this. /s
Who'da thunk it!?
I’m more amazed that the IOC would piss off the ChiComs.
One of them was 14? Yeah...right.
Gymnasts are typically very petite, but at least one of them hadn’t lost her primary teeth yet!!
That was fast. 10 years...
Should’ve moved on both 2000 *and* 2008.
Yeah, I was taller in the 6th grade than that supposed “16 year old” was at the Olympics.
Here's a picture of Dong, from the 2000 Games.
LOL
Her real name was Wei Tu-Yung.
/jk
What’s in the background, a factory for straightjackets and handcuffs?
The Olympic official’s name was Xi Lai Ye.
Yep. When are they going to strip their gold from the 2008 Olympics? They had atleast 2 underage gymnasts in that competition.
I can’t remember what year it was, but in one of the Olympics, there was a North Korean gymnast who looked she weighed about 30 pounds and was MISSING her two front teeth, as well as having what were clearly baby teeth right next to them. Naturally they claimed that the teeth had been training casualties, butit was really bizarre that they hadn’t installed cosmetic replacements to divert attention from the fact that the kid clearly wasn’t more than 7 years old.
There are some people (including a college friend of mine) who simply don’t develop adult teeth, and the baby teeth therefore never fall out (though they tend to require a great deal of maintenance work, since they weren’t designed to last very long). So the presence of baby teeth isn’t absolutely certain evidence of pre-pubescent age. But when the adult teeth have recently pushed out the baby teeth, that’s a sure giveaway.
It’s pretty hard to prove the age of someone whose government is extremely secretive and not cooperating. The only reason they nailed this one is that somebody in the Chinese sports machine screwed up and put her actual age on identifying information for her when she worked as an official at the 2008 Olympics.
From the article:
“Dong’s accreditation information for the Beijing Olympics, where she worked as a national technical official, listed her birthday as Jan. 23, 1986. That would have made her 14 in Sydney — too young to compete. Her birth date in the FIG database is listed as Jan. 20, 1983.”
Some poor schmuck in the Chinese sports machine (who may not have been working there voluntarily) has probably been imprisoned, if not executed, for slipping up and putting this young lady’s true birth date on her Beijing Olympics papers.
It’s not hard at all to prove considering another Chinese gymnast on the Sydney team Yang Yun admitted in a 2007 interview she was 14 in Sydney. But just now they are acting, and they still haven’t stripped Yang of her individual medal in uneven bars.
No, her name was Lei Tul-Gurl.
LOL...perfect.
Lots of gymnasts are very short for their age, and as full-grown adults. Partly it’s because smaller people are naturally better at the most difficult acrobatic skills, and partly it’s because intense training tends to slow growth. The training can also cause growth plates in the bones to close earlier than usual, resulting in a final adult height of less than the person would have had if they’d never done gymnastics.
Mary Lou Retton was only 4’9” at age 16 in the 1984 Olympics, and never grew any taller. I used to coach gymnastics, and there were some really tiny girls who looked half their age, and they weren’t even in Olympic-level training. They just gravitated to the sport because they were well-suited to it, and perhaps because it made them feel good about their unusually small stature, which probably was a social burden at school.
Since Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese tend to be naturally shorter than Caucasians, I wouldn’t be surprised of some of the women naturally top out at at 4’4” or 4’5”, and of course when there’s a national sports program that scours the country for tots with perfect characteristics for certain sports, and basically yanks them out their homes and away to training academies, regardless of what their parents want, the tiniest citizens are likely to end up on the gymnastics team.
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