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.
In 2011, in the wake of Dong Fangxiao’s verdict and amid a skating age scandal, Chinese journalists wrote openly about the problem of age falsification in sport. Even the China Youth Daily addressed the issue, underscoring just how messy age adjustments could be:
In Chinese sport, athletes falsifying their ages has long been an open secret. This reporter has frequently encountered a revealing phenomenon when interviewing athletes: ask them how old they are, and they often have to think for a long time, sometimes even consulting teammates before answering — because some athletes have changed their ages not once but multiple times, and have lost track of their own versions.
Ci Xin, China Youth Daily, February 18, 2011, p. 8
在中国体坛，运动员改年龄早已是公开的秘密，记者在采访不少运动员时就常常遇到一个奇怪的现象，当问及这些运动员的年龄时，他们往往要思考半天，甚至要与自己的队友讨论一番，因为有的运动员不仅改了年龄，还改了不止一次，年龄改来改去，连自己都糊涂了。
The China Youth Daily is the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China.
Though the article did not mention Jiang Yuyuan, her case illustrates the phenomenon clearly. Depending on the document consulted, she appears to have been born in 1993, 1992, or 1991.
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.
The story of He Kexin’s age has been told many times, but nearly always from the same vantage point. Western readers know the New York Times investigation, the deleted spreadsheets, and Béla Károlyi’s comments about baby teeth. What they do not know — because almost none of it has been translated or discussed in English — is how Chinese mainland media told the same story.
This essay traces that mainland narrative across a single year, from the first stray press mentions of He Kexin’s age in late 2007 through the International Gymnastics Federation’s formal resolution of the controversy in October 2008. It is not, primarily, a story about whether she was 14 or 16. It is a story about how the same events, covered by journalists working under different constraints and writing for different audiences, can produce such divergent accounts.
Yang Yun was fifteen years old—officially—when she competed at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Her registered birthdate, December 2, 1984, meant she turned sixteen in the Olympic year, clearing the minimum age requirement set by the International Gymnastics Federation in 1997. She won bronze medals in both the team event and on uneven bars.
In 2001, she competed in the Goodwill Games, but ultimately, the Sydney Olympics were her first and last major competition. After retiring, she enrolled at the Communication University of China to train as a broadcaster. By 2008, she had established herself as a sports commentator and was engaged to Yang Wei, who would go on to win the men’s all-around champion in Beijing.
In the months leading up to the Beijing Olympics, Yang Yun was cast as a supporting figure in a love story, not the subject of scrutiny.
Then the documents began to surface.
In November 2001, at China’s Ninth National Games, a small gymnast from Beijing captured the country’s attention. Newspapers called her “Kang Douzi”—“Little Bean Kang”—and, almost without exception, they described her the same way: just thirteen years old. She cried after a costly fall on uneven bars that may have cost her team the gold. Days later, she rebounded to win the all-around title, throwing herself into her coach’s arms, still unmistakably a child on one of the biggest stages in Chinese sport.
And yet, within a year, that same gymnast had changed. By 2002, Kang Xin was no longer thirteen. According to her official profile, she was sixteen—old enough to compete internationally, old enough to stand alongside China’s senior team at the Asian Games.
How does a gymnast age three years in the span of one?
There’s a fact that the Chinese media likes to print:
July 28, 1996, was the day of the women’s uneven bars final at the Atlanta Olympics, and it was also Bi Wenjing’s 15th birthday.
她们的的故事要从亚特兰大说起，1996年7月28日这一天是亚特兰大奥运会女子高低杠决赛的日子，这一天也是毕文静15岁的生日。
“Nothing Is Impossible—The Girl Who Defeated the Queen” (做不到没有想不到 战胜皇后的女孩), Sohu Sports, April 16, 2007
There’s one problem with that story: Bi Wenjing didn’t turn 15 in 1996. She turned 13.
When Sun Xiaojiao won bronze on balance beam at the 2001 World Championships, she turned 17 that year, according to the FIG’s records. A year later, when she took gold at the 2002 World Cup Final, she turned 18.
But here’s the thing: Sun Xiaojiao was not born in 1984.
Ling Jie, like many Chinese gymnasts, was a standout on uneven bars and balance beam, and like many other Chinese bars and beam queens, her age appears to have been adjusted. In her case, her birth year was moved backward to 1982, making her eligible to compete at the 1998 Asian Games in Bangkok, where the Chinese women won team gold.
Even during her competitive career, there were indications that Ling Jie had both a registered “competition age” and an “actual age” (实际年龄). What, precisely, her “actual age” is remains a matter of debate. Today, Ling Jie lives in the United States, where she coaches at World Champions Centre—the Biles family’s gym—and uses one birth year; yet in the coverage of the Sydney Games, the Chinese press circulated another.
This article does not attempt to resolve the question of her true birth year. What is clear, however, is that she was not born in 1982 and therefore was not 16 at the 1998 Asian Games.
Below, you can find what has been printed about her age, as well as several profiles about the 1999 beam champion.
