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
In August 2006, at the Asian Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Surat, India, Hong Su Jeong stood on the vault podium with a silver medal around her neck. The gold went to her younger sister, Hong Eun Jeong—a result that seemed to mark an early challenge to the sibling hierarchy. Four months later, at the Asian Games in Doha, Qatar, the order reversed. Hong Su Jeong again won silver on vault, but that time, she finished ahead of her younger sister, who took bronze.
The results fit neatly into the story that surrounded them. Hong Su Jeong was cast as the elder sister—more experienced, more seasoned—while Hong Eun Jeong, three years younger, was presented as the promising successor rising in her wake. A profile in the Beijing Evening News in 2006 reinforced the contrast, noting that Hong Su Jeong had trained for nine years, while her younger sister had trained for only six.
The story of two sisters competing together was endearing, and over the years, the math was stable, with the sisters always being three years apart.
But it turned out to be false.
Cheng Fei, 1st place; Hong Su Jeong, 2nd place; Hong Eun Jeong, 3rd place; Asian Games, 2006
Note: Throughout this piece, I’ve bolded Hong Su Jeong’s name to help visually differentiate her name from her younger sisters’ name.
In early January 1993, the International Gymnastics Federation announced a decision that was unprecedented in the sport’s history: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s women’s gymnastics team would be banned from that year’s World Championships in Birmingham. The reason? The federation had entered Kim Gwang Suk into international competition with three different birthdates—October 5, 1974, at the 1989 World Championships; February 15, 1975, at the 1991 Worlds; and February 15, 1976, at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
“This is not a case of doping, and under no circumstances is she guilty,” FIG Secretary General Norbert Bueche told reporters in Geneva. “The dates of birth were deliberately falsified by the association. Such actions cannot be tolerated.”
Kim Gwang Suk’s case marked the first time the FIG had publicly exposed and sanctioned age falsification in elite gymnastics, though the practice was widely suspected to have occurred for years. The case revealed both the lengths to which some federations would go to gain a competitive advantage and the challenges international sports bodies faced in enforcing their own age eligibility rules.
Thirty years after Kim Gwang Suk’s competitive career ended, her life is still a mystery. What survives are fragments: competition reports, newspaper descriptions, brief quotations filtered through translators—almost all produced outside North Korea. This essay follows the traces she left on the international stage between 1989 and 1993, as recorded by foreign journalists and officials, and concludes by examining the narrow but consequential precedent her case set for how the FIG would confront age falsification in the years that followed.
In April 1981, a gymnast from Kharkov stepped onto the podium at Leningrad’s Yubileiny Sports Palace and won the USSR Cup in artistic gymnastics. Alla Misnik, training under coach Valentin Shumovsky, announced herself as one of Soviet gymnastics’ brightest new talents. Her uneven bars routine featured what Sovetsky Sport called “a magnificent cascade” of elements—a Tkachev, a Jaeger, clear-hip circles with pirouettes, a double-back dismount—forming what one judge described as “a routine of the future.”
A month later, Misnik traveled to Madrid for the 1981 European Championships. There, the Soviet Union’s leading gymnast did not win. She finished third in the all-around behind East Germany’s Maxi Gnauck and Romania’s Cristina Grigoraș, and earned silver medals on uneven bars and floor exercise. For a debut at a major international championship, the results were impressive.
Yet they were results that required explanation in the Soviet press. Why had the Soviet team failed to win a single gold medal? Internationally, the outcome ignited debates about the direction of women’s gymnastics. Was it really a women’s sport anymore?
What went largely unremarked at the time, however, was a more basic fact: Misnik was too young to be competing in Madrid at all.
In October 1978, gymnasts gathered in Strasbourg, France, for the XIX World Artistic Gymnastics Championships. Among the Bulgarian women was Krassimira Toneva, who, like many gymnasts in the sport’s history, was technically too young to be there. She was born in 1965.
In the summer of 1993, a minor act of deception briefly exposed a much larger truth about international gymnastics. At the European Championships in rhythmic gymnastics, a thirteen-year-old Dutch athlete was entered into competition using a teammate’s passport—an expedient decision made to avoid a poor result, and one that unraveled almost immediately. What followed was not a dramatic scandal, but something quieter and more revealing: admissions of responsibility, careful hedging of language, and a collective effort to keep consequences manageable.
The Dutch press covered the episode in a restrained, procedural tone. Reports in De Telegraaf and NRC Handelsblad detail how officials within the Dutch Gymnastics Federation (KNGB) knowingly circumvented age-eligibility rules, how the European Gymnastics Federation (UEG) investigated the breach, and how blame was diffused among coaches, administrators, and judges. The prose is sober; the facts are clear. Yet beneath this matter-of-fact surface lies a familiar pattern—one that challenges easy assumptions about where and how age manipulation occurs in the sport.
Age falsification in gymnastics is often narrated as an Eastern Bloc pathology: the product of centralized authority, pliable civil registries, and authoritarian sports systems willing to rewrite identity in service of medals. The Dutch case unsettles that narrative. Here was a Western European federation operating within a democratic state, an independent press, and formal oversight mechanisms—yet subject to the same pressures and incentives. Fear of finishing low in the rankings, institutional expectations of success, and the belief that everyone else was bending the rules proved sufficient to justify deliberate deception.
The mechanics of the fraud are themselves instructive. Lacking the ability—or political cover—to alter official documents, Dutch officials resorted to substitution rather than fabrication: entering an underage gymnast under another athlete’s passport and trusting that inspections would be cursory. This was not naïveté but pragmatism shaped by structural constraint. It reveals how rule-bending adapts to local conditions, even as its underlying logic remains constant.
Equally telling is the response from governing bodies. Despite explicit admissions that fraud had occurred, there was little appetite within the European Union of Gymnastics (UEG) for severe punishment. Officials emphasized their own inspection failures, spoke of shared responsibility, and repeatedly downplayed the likelihood of a suspension. The prevailing tone was conciliatory rather than corrective—a preference for containment over confrontation. Read together, these articles illuminate a sport in which age manipulation was widely understood, unevenly enforced, and, so long as it avoided public embarrassment, often met with indulgence rather than meaningful consequence.
In 1986 and 1987, Chinese media presented Chen Cuiting as a gymnast perfectly timed for inheritance: the nation’s elegant answer to Romania’s Daniela Silivaș. Reporting from the Seoul Asian Games, a People’s Daily correspondent lingered on her “spring swallow” lightness, praising the ease with which she carried herself to the all-around title. Both that article and a subsequent China Pictorial profile placed her age at fifteen—young, but properly arrived.
The China Pictorial piece, published in February 1987, filled in the arc behind the moment. Born on July 15, 1971, in Changsha, Hunan, Chen had risen from a raw “tumblebug”—a nickname earned for her explosive tumbling—into a national champion who, as the magazine put it, had learned to “smile spontaneously to the music.” It was a familiar story of discipline refined into artistry, told at precisely the point when promise seemed to be turning into permanence.
From today’s vantage point, however, that narrative no longer sits so easily. Across both Chinese- and English-language websites, Chen’s birthdate now appears as November 15, 1972. If accurate, she would have been only thirteen, turning fourteen, during the 1986 season—below the minimum age of fifteen required for senior international competition. The confident certainties of the mid-1980s press thus coexist uneasily with a digital record that rewrites the calendar.
Whatever the truth of her age, Chen Cuiting’s competitive record is unmistakable. She dominated Chinese women’s gymnastics through the late 1980s, breaking out internationally at the 1986 Asian Games with team gold, all-around gold, floor gold, and vault silver. She remained the country’s leading all-arounder at home, winning the title at the 1987 National Games and the 1988 National Championships. Though her Seoul Olympics yielded no individual medals—fourteenth in the all-around, sixth with the team—she rebounded at the 1989 World Championships with team bronze and top-six finishes in the all-around, beam, and floor. Her career closed where it had begun to crest: at the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing, she again swept gold in the team, all-around, and floor, adding another vault silver before retiring. In just five years, she anchored the national team through a transitional era, her dominance unquestioned even as the story told about her grew more complicated.
