Category: Age

At the end of 2018, Ye Zhennan, team leader of the national gymnastics squad, acknowledged that the women’s national team had entered a difficult period. One reason, he explained, was the lack of eligible athletes born in 2001 and 2002:

“This has been an extremely difficult year for the women’s team. Athletes born in 2001 and 2002 are almost entirely missing from the pipeline. The premature retirement of Wang Yan — the All-National Games double champion in vault and floor — combined with serious injuries to key athletes, including Mao Yi, Fan Yilin, and Li Qi, has left the team noticeably weakened. Through the coaching of head coach Qiao Liang and the experience gained at the Asian Games and World Championships, the athletes have undergone a remarkable transformation in both their training level and their mental outlook.”

“女队今年是非常困难的一年，2001、2002年龄段出生的队员几乎断档，全运会跳马、自由操双料冠军王妍的过早退役以及毛艺、范忆琳、黎琪等重点队员出现严重伤病，使队伍实力上有所欠缺。通过乔良主教练在训练水平上的弥补，和在亚运会、世锦赛的历练让队员在训练水平和精神面貌有了焕然一新的改变。”

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In a country of more than a billion people, it is difficult to believe that China simply produced very few gymnasts born in 2001 and 2002. There are, however, several possible explanations. Perhaps the national team focused so heavily on preparing the 1999 and 2000 cohorts for the Rio Olympics that the next generation was neglected. Or perhaps some gymnasts born in 2001 and 2002 had their ages adjusted in order to make them eligible for the Rio Olympics.

Luo Huan’s case points to that possibility. Her reported birth year appears to shift from 2002 to 2000. But the significance of her age extends beyond a single discrepancy. It offers a window into a broader pattern: a system in which age alterations appear not as rare exceptions, but as something closer to routine practice — often taking place during early childhood, long before a gymnast ever reaches the international stage.

At the 2016 Rio Olympics, Chinese gymnasts again faced questions about their ages. Although the controversy received little attention in the United States — likely overshadowed by the emerging abuse scandal surrounding USA Gymnastics — it was widely discussed in China.

One exchange, in particular, stood out after the team final, where the Chinese team won bronze. “Many viewers watched the competition and were surprised by how young the Chinese team members look” (“很多观众看了比赛，他们对中国队员的年轻感到吃惊”), a foreign reporter remarked. “They seem very small, as if they might not quite be of eligible age” (“感觉看起来很小，似乎不是很够（参赛）年龄？”).

The question placed the gymnasts in an uncomfortable position. Any careless or ambiguous wording could easily have been amplified by foreign media and turned into another international controversy. But, according to Chinese media, the athletes responded calmly and confidently.

“We just look relatively young” (“我们只是看起来比较年轻”), team captain Shang Chunsong answered first.

“We do look young” (“我们就是看起来比较小”), Fan Yilin added, “but one of the American team members is actually younger than us” (“但是美国一名队员比我们还要小呀”).

Then Shang Chunsong concluded matter-of-factly: “Tan Jiaxin is from 1996; the rest of us are from 1999” (“谭佳薪是96年的，其余都是99年的”).

There was only one problem with that response: in the weeks leading up to Rio, Chinese state media had repeatedly described Wang Yan as belonging to the “post-2000s generation.”

In 2011, the Chinese women’s team finished third, but it faced a structural problem. According to Lu Shanzhen, the coach who “single-handedly built China’s women’s team to its 2008 glory,” the pool of age-eligible athletes was dangerously shallow. As a result, the team’s future hinged on just two young gymnasts: Yao Jinnan and Tan Sixin. Here’s what Lu Shanzhen said to the China Youth Daily during the 2011 World Championships:

“China’s women’s team currently has very few age-eligible young athletes available for London 2012 preparations; it simply cannot be compared to the American or Russian teams. We have only two young athletes we are developing as priority targets: one is Yao Jinnan, and the other is Tan Sixin. Tan Sixin’s underperformance tonight will certainly have an impact on our London preparations. Athletes who compete at the Olympics must have strong consistency.”

Ci Xin, China Youth Daily, October 12, 2011, p. 4

    “中国队目前可以用于备战2012年伦敦奥运会的适龄年轻选手非常少，完全不能同美国队和俄罗斯队相比，我们只有两名年轻队员为重点培养对象，一个是姚金男，一个就是谭思欣。谭思欣今晚的失常表现，对我们备战伦敦奥运会肯定会有影响，参加奥运会的队员必须具有良好的稳定性。”

On paper, this made sense: with an official February 8, 1995, birthdate, Yao Jinnan would have turned sixteen in 2011 and thus been age-eligible for London. But was she?

The answer to that question turns, unexpectedly, on the age of her twin sister, Yao Jianan, who had also trained as a gymnast, and whose recorded birthdate did not align with 1995.

In 2008, Cheng Fei was widely reported to be 20 years old. CCTV.com—the website of China’s state broadcaster—underscored that point in a retrospective on the 2008 season published on December 23, 2008:

As is widely known, gymnastics is a sport that demands enormous investment and carries high costs, yet produces relatively few elite athletes. For a female competitor, a gymnast makes her debut at around sixteen and has essentially passed the peak of her athletic career by twenty — the golden window is just four short years, and the athletes who manage to last through it are vanishingly rare. Cheng Fei, currently the oldest member of the Chinese women’s team, is exactly twenty; young talents such as Yang Yilin and He Kexin are around seventeen. If they can stay healthy and maintain their form, competing at the London Olympics is entirely within reach.

众所周知，体操是一项投入大、成本高，但成材率较低的项目。对于一个女子运动员来说，16岁初出茅庐，到20岁已经基本过了运动生涯的巅峰，黄金时期只有短短四年时间，能坚持下来的队员凤毛麟角。目前中国女队年龄最大的程菲正好20岁，杨伊琳、何可欣等小将都在17岁左右，如果能避免伤病保持状态，出战伦敦奥运会完全有可能。

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Even the New York Times, which was at the forefront of Olympic age scrutiny in Beijing, did not challenge Cheng Fei’s stated age. In “A Life of Sacrifice for a Vault of Gold,” David Barboza wrote:

Today, all grown up at 20, Cheng is not simply promising. She is China’s top female gymnast and the country’s best hope of winning a gold medal in that sport at the Olympic Games in Beijing…

Yet the available paper trail suggests that Cheng Fei, like a number of Chinese gymnasts over the decades, may not have been born in the year listed in her FIG registration. Even CCTV.com—which said she was “exactly twenty” in 2008—had previously published an article that used a different birth year to calculate her age.

What follows is a closer look at the evidence indicating that Cheng Fei was likely not born in 1988.

Imagine being born on January 22, 1995. That would make you perfectly timed for senior competition in 2011 and 2012. But if your national team needed you in 2010, you would miss eligibility by just 22 days. Now imagine that your birthdate could be moved by exactly one month—to December 22, 1994—making you eligible for the 2010 season.

That appears to be what happened with Wu Liufang.

When Sui Lu finished second on balance beam at the 2012 Olympics, she was widely described as a 20-year-old. For example, Jiefang Daily, one of Shanghai’s leading newspapers, wrote:

At age 20, a female gymnast must overcome even more obstacles. Sui Lu’s performances at these Olympics had already proven her ability.

20岁，对一名女子体操运动员来说，需要克服更多的困难。眭禄在本届奥运会的表现，已经证明了自己的实力。

But was Sui Lu really 20 in 2012? There’s a significant paper trail that suggests she was only 19 in London.

In 2008, Mike Walker, a cybersecurity specialist, uncovered cached spreadsheets from the Chinese government’s official sports website. At the time, attention centered on He Kexin and the birthdate listed in those documents: January 1, 1994. But she was not the only gymnast whose age shifted over time. Huang Qiushuang’s birthdate did as well. In fact, those same documents show her age changing.

But there is another wrinkle: Huang Qiushuang may have been even younger than the dates listed in those spreadsheets. At least, that was the view of some Chinese journalists.

The question was simple enough: how old was He Kexin?

It was the question that defined women’s gymnastics at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, shadowed China’s historic team gold, and resurfaced repeatedly in the years that followed. But embedded within it was a second, harder question: why had this become an issue in the first place?

In the West, the conventional answer pointed first to the Chinese state — a system that had been suspected of age falsification, and that controlled the bureaucratic infrastructure of sport: passports, identity cards, and national registration systems. A second answer pointed to the American press, which had built an international controversy out of cached web pages, newspaper articles, and the appearances of a teenage athlete.

But in Chinese-language media coverage of the controversy, a third explanation appeared. It pointed not to Beijing and not to U.S. journalists, but to one of the most famous coaching partnerships in gymnastics history: Béla and Márta Károlyi.

In that telling, the Károlyis were not neutral observers of the controversy. They were among its principal drivers.