Even though Li Li never won a medal at the Olympics or World Championships, she remains a gymnastics icon. Her uneven bars routine was something special: German giants directly connected to a Tkatchev, borrowing an old skill from men’s high bar and adding a release to the end. On beam, she unveiled a back spin that few gymnasts could execute cleanly on the floor, let alone on ten centimeters of suede. And then there is the photograph: Li Li, draped over the balance beam, back arched, legs in a perfect split. For a generation of fans, that image is Chinese gymnastics at the dawn of the 1990s.
But like many gymnasts of her era, Li Li had two ages: her official birth date and her competitive birthdate, which had been adjusted to meet the age requirements for the 1990 World Cup and the 1990 Asian Games.
At the 1996 World Gymnastics Championships in San Juan, Puerto Rico, fifteen-year-old Kui Yuanyuan stepped onto the floor exercise as an unlikely candidate for gold. Not considered a core member of China’s women’s team, she had nonetheless turned heads in the semifinals with a second-place finish — and then, in the final, delivered a routine that would define her young career. The following profile, published in People’s Daily on April 22, 1996, captures that remarkable night through the eyes of staff reporter Miao Lu.
Kui Yuanyuan’s San Juan triumph was the beginning of a decorated international career. She would go on to help China claim the team bronze at the 1997 World Championships in Lausanne and earn individual bronze on balance beam at that same competition. She was also a member of the 2000 Olympic team that was stripped of its bronze medal.
But was she really 15 in 1996? The answer—drawn from the People’s Daily itself—is most likely no. Six months after describing her as 15 in San Juan, the same newspaper covered the 1996 National Championships, where Kui won the all-around, and referred to her as “not yet 15.” The contradiction is telling. With her birthday reportedly in June, an athlete who was “not yet 15” in October 1996 could not have been born in 1981. Which means she could not have been 15 at the World Championships in April or the Olympics in July—and could not have been 16 at the 1997 Worlds, either.
But was she still delightful to watch? Yes. So, enjoy these articles and videos of Kui.
“In gymnastics, doping can’t help you. That’s precisely why I don’t understand why anti-doping controls are carried out so often.”
When Romanian coach Nicolae Forminte made that claim to Pro Sport in August 2008, he was articulating a belief long embedded in the sport’s self-image: gymnastics and doping are incongruous. The implication was clear. If performance-enhancing drugs offer no advantage, then the problem scarcely exists.
And yet, it did.
Doping was not foreign to the Romanian gymnastics program; it was part of its history. In Degrees of Difficulty, historian Georgia Cervin has argued that doping in Romania was more systematic “at least until the year 2000, when Răducan was stripped of her gold medal in the all-around after the team doctor gave her, and allegedly the entire team, pseudoephedrine.” The episode, she writes, reveals that “over the last four decades, at least, coaches, officials, and even medical staff have conspired to break the rules in order to win medals, thereby jeopardizing gymnasts’ careers and health.”
Pseudoephedrine was not the only substance circulating within the system. In her autobiography, Prețul aurului. Sinceritate incomodă (The Price of Gold. Uncomfortable Honesty), Maria Olaru describes the pressures placed on gymnasts to maintain competition weight. The options, she suggests, were stark: develop bulimia, or be “forced” to take furosemide—a banned diuretic that can also be used to mask other drugs, including anabolic steroids.
Simona Amânar, Andreea Răducan, and Maria Olaru, 2000
Furosemide is the most common doping violation in women’s artistic gymnastics. Publicly documented cases include those of Nadzeya Vysotskaya (2006), Đỗ Thị Ngân Thương (2008), Daiane dos Santos (2009), Kristina Goryunova (2009), Luisa Galiulina (2012), Angelina Simakova (2022).
But not all cases make their way onto the widely circulated lists. In 1998, just weeks before the Asian Games, four South Korean gymnasts tested positive for furosemide—a banned diuretic used for weight loss and, in some cases, to mask other prohibited substances, including anabolic steroids. When all was said and done, South Korea’s national team had only three members because the other four members had been suspended.
What follows is their story, as it unfolded in the pages of the Dong-A Ilbo.
The women’s all-around final at the Sydney Olympics began at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 21, 2000. Maria Olaru, competing for Romania alongside Simona Amânar and Andreea Răducan, had made a prediction before the competition started. She told her coaches that all three Romanians would make the podium. When Octavian Belu, Romania’s head coach, relayed this to reporters afterward, he added with affectionate exasperation: “She has the instincts of a witch. She scares me. From now on, anyone who wants to win the lottery should ask her what numbers will come up.”
By the end of the night, the witch had been proven right. Răducan stood atop the podium with a score of 38.893, flanked by Amânar (38.642) and Olaru (38.581). It was the first time since the 1960 Rome Olympics that a single nation had swept all three medals in the women’s all-around at the Games.
What Olaru could not predict—what no one in the SuperDome that night could have imagined—was what followed.
Simona Amânar, Andreea Răducan, and Maria Olaru, 2000 Olympics
In the spring of 1981, People’s Daily ran a glowing profile of Huang Qun, one of China’s most promising young gymnasts. The piece described her as 13 years old — a detail that would later take on significance. If the newspaper was correct, Huang was born in 1968. Yet when she stepped onto the podium at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics to claim a bronze medal with her team, the official record listed her birth year as 1969. The discrepancy is modest by the standards of Cold War gymnastics, but it is documented in one of China’s own state-run publications, at a moment when there was no reason to misrepresent her age in either direction. The profile below, translated here in full, offers a rare contemporaneous snapshot of Huang Qun at the start of her international career — and another data point in the long history of age falsification in elite gymnastics.
In the summer of 1984, Ecaterina Szabó achieved something that, even in an era of liberal scoring, stood out as exceptional: she recorded two perfect all-around totals of 40.00, months apart and in markedly different competitive settings. The first came in June, at a dual meet against Czechoslovakia in Prague, where Szabó received a 10.00 on all four of her optional routines—a feat that FIG officials publicly acknowledged as unprecedented. The second followed in August at the “40th Anniversary Cup” in Buzău, a domestic competition staged in the afterglow of the Los Angeles Olympics, where she again scored a perfect 40.00.
Here are a few newspaper articles about those competitions.
Ecaterina Szabo, Romania, gold medallist (Photo by S&G/PA Images via Getty Images)
In April 2010, the International Olympic Committee stripped China’s women’s gymnastics team of its bronze medal from the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The decision followed an eight-month investigation by the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG), which concluded that team member Dong Fangxiao had been 14 years old at the Games—two years below the minimum age of 16.
The English-language coverage of the scandal—the discovery of conflicting documents, the investigation, the ruling, and the redistribution of medals—has been extensively documented. Less familiar to English-speaking audiences is how the case unfolded inside China: how state media framed the ruling, how sports officials explained it to the public, and how Chinese journalists and commentators responded.
What emerged was not a single narrative, but a fractured one. Alongside brief, formulaic official statements ran a parallel discussion in China’s press that questioned responsibility, credibility, and the structure of a state-run sports system that governed athletes’ lives long before—and long after—the medal was won.
In September 2014, the International Gymnastics Federation issued a disciplinary notice withdrawing the license of a North Korean gymnast, fining her federation, and annulling her results.
The gymnast was Cha Yeong Hwa (차영화), and once again, the charge was age falsification.
What made the case significant was not the accusation itself—by then, age manipulation was a familiar problem—but how quickly it was detected and how comprehensively it was punished. Compared with earlier North Korean cases, Cha’s discrepancy was smaller. The response was not.
Hong Su Jeong, 1st place; He Ning, 2nd place; Cha Yeong Hwa, 3rd place; Uneven Bars, 2006 Asian Games
Uemura Miki of Japan would eventually take Cha’s third-place spot.
In October 2002, more than two decades after Romania’s women’s gymnastics team won gold in Fort Worth, Rodica Dunca broke a long silence. Speaking to Pro Sport, the former international gymnast described daily life inside the Deva training camp not as a center of excellence, but as a place of hunger, surveillance, fear, and physical coercion. Her testimony names teammates whose faces became global symbols of grace—Nadia Comăneci, Melitta Rühn, Emilia Eberle (Trudi Kollar), Dumitrița Turner, Teodora Ungureanu—and places their medals alongside scenes of beatings, escapes intercepted by the Securitate, and bodies pushed beyond collapse. What Dunca recounts is not a single shocking incident, but a system: one in which control over food, water, movement, pain, and obedience defined her adolescence.
Like Eberhard Gienger, Dunca recalls being given an obscene number of pills and injections; unlike Gienger—who admitted to returning many of them to the pharmacy—she was compelled to take everything she was given. Dunca does not identify the substances involved, making it impossible to determine whether any appeared on the IOC’s banned list. She was competing, moreover, in an era when the FIG did not conduct systematic testing, and when the reliability of the drug controls at the 1980 Olympics remains questionable at best. Even had prohibited substances been involved, a positive test would have been unlikely.
Yet the absence of a positive test is not the absence of a problem. Dunca’s account instead directs attention to the medical regime under which Romanian gymnasts trained and competed. The forced ingestion of dozens of unidentified tablets each day, the routine administration of injections associated with prolonged amenorrhea, and the later emergence of drug dependence—all point to a system of non-therapeutic, coercive medical management that regulated young athletes’ bodies for performance, not health.
Set against official narratives of discipline, sacrifice, and triumph—most famously associated with Béla Károlyi—Dunca’s interview exposes the cost hidden behind the perfect smiles and historic scores. It is a reminder that Romania’s golden era in women’s gymnastics was built not only on innovation and talent, but also on practices that blurred the line between training and punishment, medicine and control, excellence and abuse.
Below, you’ll find a translation of ProSport‘s interview with Dunca from October 26, 2002.
Rodica Dunca (the second gymnast from the left), 1980 Olympics
