Category: Age

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.

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.

Qiao Ya was a member of the Chinese team that won silver at the 1995 World Championships. Like many of China’s beam queens, she came agonizingly close to an individual medal: in the 1994 event final, she fell at the end of her layout stepout series, dropping out of contention and into seventh place. In 1995, Qiao Ya once again finished seventh on beam (without a fall). But when she hit her routine, it was a thing of beauty.

Her career followed a familiar pattern in another respect. Like many Chinese gymnasts of the era, her age was adjusted. Her birth year was changed from 1979 to 1977, which made her eligible for the 1991 World Championships and the 1992 Olympic Games, though she ultimately competed in neither.

She did appear at the 1992 Chunichi Cup, where she placed thirteenth in the all-around. In 1993, she competed primarily in smaller meets such as the China Cup, where she won the all-around at her actual age of fourteen and at her competitive age of sixteen. Her first major senior assignments, however, did not come until 1994, when she was fifteen and age-eligible by her true birth year (1979).