In 2008, criticism was not limited to age. It extended to the Chinese gymnasts’ makeup, as well, with the two themes often treated as inseparable. Writing for NBC News, Thomas Boswell wrote:
But if it’s tears you want, the kind you feel inside when you see a small girl in glittery makeup trying to pretend she’s 16 — and eligible for the Olympics — when she may only be 14, then National Indoor Stadium was the place to come for that emotion, too.
Thomas Boswell, NBCNews.com
He returned to the subject later in the piece:
Next to He, accepting praise, was Jiang Yuyuan, an amazing uneven-bar performer. Both looked extremely young despite thick makeup, sparkles, and fairly sophisticated hairstyles.
Thomas Boswell, NBCNews.com
Across the Atlantic, Sonia Oxley echoed that sentiment in a Reuters piece pointedly titled “Makeup Cannot Cover up Age Issue.” She argued that makeup was being used to make the gymnasts appear older. The article opened:
Even with their eyeshadow and mascara, gymnasts look young. The question is, exactly how young? China’s tiny leotard-clad athletes have repeatedly had to fend off questions about not being old enough to compete at the Olympics. On Friday, the International Olympic Committee called for an investigation into exactly how old one gold medallist is.
Sonia Oxley, Makeup cannot cover up age issue, Reuters
The piece continued:
The nature of the sport means gymnasts often look younger than they really are because they are shorter than average and also very light. The glitter and the makeup helps them look a bit older.
Sonia Oxley, Makeup cannot cover up age issue, Reuters
While much of the U.S. coverage of He Kexin focused on her age, there were many profiles of He Kexin in the Chinese press. They painted a portrait almost entirely different in emphasis: not a suspicious document trail, but a girl from Beijing with trembling hands and an idol named Khorkina.
The American story was essentially demographic — a birth year, an age, a discrepancy. The Chinese story was biographical, and its details had the texture of something lived rather than constructed. A coach named Shang Chunyan remembered going to a kindergarten near Yonghegong in 1997, looking for recruits among five-year-olds. She noticed a small girl — not tall, not overweight, nothing exceptional yet. She took her anyway. That girl, years later, would win China’s seventh gold medal of the Beijing Games.
The road was not straight. When the national team selectors visited the Beijing squad to scout for Olympic prospects, their first impression of He Kexin was unflattering. She was “bent everywhere,” one coach recalled — her movements awkward, her form uninspiring. The only time she looked graceful was when she was upside down. They took her on that basis, as something of a gamble, and she rewarded the gamble almost immediately. A foot injury that ruled out balance beam and floor exercise forced her coaches to try an experiment: put her entirely on the uneven bars. In two months, she had mastered the Li Ya salto, one of the most demanding release skills in the sport. Her coaches were astonished. The nickname “Princess of the Uneven Bars” was not far behind.
But the profiles also preserved the setbacks. At the 2007 City Games, she fell off uneven bars. Afterward, she sat alone in the stands and watched the rest of the competition in silence, refusing to eat, refusing to rest — as if she were punishing herself. It was, reporters noted, the most heartbroken she had ever been. That moment of private devastation appears in multiple accounts, always in the same register: not as a scandal but as evidence of seriousness, of how much it mattered to her. The same attentiveness extended to smaller details. During a team training check, coaches discovered she had skipped lunch and eaten only a piece of chocolate before the afternoon competition. She told them she was afraid of feeling heavy on the apparatus. She never threw a temper tantrum when disciplined. When a surprise dormitory inspection ended with everyone else quietly slipping away, she stayed and cleaned the room herself.
By the time the Beijing Olympics arrived, these stories had accumulated into a coherent character: diligent, self-possessed, quietly stubborn. On the night of the uneven bars final, competing first against a field that included three recent world champions, she admitted afterward that her hands had been shaking. She said she hadn’t let herself think about the gold medal, because the more you think about gold, the more pressure you feel. She performed a flawless routine. When American star Nastia Liukin matched her score of 16.725, He Kexin didn’t yet know the tie-breaking rules that would ultimately decide in her favor; she thought they might simply share the gold. When the rankings appeared on the screen, and she realized she had won outright, she ran over to Yang Yilin, who had just finished her own routine, and lifted her up.
The profiles collected here were published across several days in August 2008, in outlets ranging from the People’s Daily and Oriental Sports Daily to the PLA Daily, which capped its coverage with an earnest poem comparing He Kexin to a swallow in flight. These profiles are historical documents not only of what she accomplished, but of how China chose to present her.
Jiang Yuyuan, He Kexin, and Tsurumi Koko, December 2008, World Cup Final, Madrid, Spain
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.
Gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi speaks during a 2014 news conference in Arlington, Texas.
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.
Nastia Liukin, He Kexin, and Yang Yilin, 2008 Olympics, Copyright: imago/Xinhua
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.
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?
Kang Xin, Date: 22.11.2002, Copyright: imago/Schreyer
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.
Sun Xiaojiao, Date: 25.11.2001 Copyright: imago/Schreyer
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.
Gold medal winner Svetlana Khorkina of Russia (C) stands with Ling Jie of China (L) and Yang Yun of China (R), 24 September 2000 following their uneven bars routine in the women’s apparatus finals at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. (Photo by WILLIAM WEST/AFP via Getty Images)
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.
We need more real connections on beam.
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).
7 Oct 1995: Members of China’s WAG team receives their silver medals at the World Championships in Sabae, Japan. Mandatory Credit: Mike Powell /Allsport
Unfortunately, it is hard to find a decent photo of just Qiao Ya, so here’s the entire team in 1995.
