Age-old question answered

PARIS – If you believe – and many don’t – that Chinese officials have been truthful about the age of their tiny Olympic gymnasts, then the latest reports out of China might give you pause.

Authorities in the south of the country, using X-ray bone analysis because official ID cards seemingly cannot be trusted, have unmasked 2,113 young athletes – or perhaps not so young – who may have been fibbing about their age, China’s official Xinhua News Agency tells us. That’s a failure rate of 15 percent, because Xinhua says 13,864 athletes were tested in all.

There’s no indication that any of the female gymnasts who won gold for China at last year’s Beijing Olympics were among those tested.

Nevertheless, the suggestion of widespread age-fakery in China is yet more food for thought for Andre Gueisbuhler, who as general secretary of the International Gymnastics Federation has been fielding the multitude of questions about whether China has competed with girls who were too young.

“Very interesting,” Gueisbuhler said of this week’s revelations from the southern province of Guangdong. “It certainly proves that our doubts as to the age (of Chinese competitors) have a certain – how do you say? – have a certain reality.”

Age-fraud is not unique to China. The physically fit likely have been passing themselves off as younger or older than they are since the Romans started conscripting armies. Major League Baseball is investigating 42 Dominican Republic prospects suspected of lying about their age when they signed professional contracts. As elsewhere, cheating in China is motivated by the desire to win medals and make money.

But the really disturbing question with the Guangdong cases is why authorities there felt they needed X-rays to get to the truth.

What does that say about authorities’ trust in their own documentation? Does that mean official ID cards, the new anti-fraud kind with an embedded computer chip that Guangdong athletes were told to present aren’t always reliable? Maybe, because authorities also ordered athletes to submit to fingerprinting.

The same standards weren’t applied with China’s Olympic gymnasts. The International Gymnastics Federation had to take at face value the passports, ID cards and other paperwork that China turned over in answer to persistent doubts that some of its girls at the Games may not have met the minimum age requirement of 16.

Gueisbuhler, who spoke to the Associated Press by phone, said that “for legal reasons” his governing body of world gymnastics is “simply not authorized to use X-rays or to use other scientific ways to check on the age” of competitors who raise doubts.

All it can do is verify their paperwork, and if there is “no contradiction between any of these documents there’s absolutely nothing we can do. So in this sense we have to trust the government.”

Perhaps so. But trust has clearly been getting shortchanged in the government-controlled world of Chinese sports.