1 post tagged “dong fangxiao”
Despite committing an error almost DPRK-esque in magnitude, China will get to keep their team gold. What does this mean for Chinese gymnastics and gymnastics in general?
1.) China will continue falsifying ages. It's naive to think otherwise. They're just going to be much more careful about it. Are they going to risk another He Kexin and fake the documents of another little prodigy and attempt to erase all articles referring to her as being age-ineligible for the Games mere months before the Olympics? Well, I don't know. That was a huge risk to take. Not only did it pay off for them, but they got away with it. If nothing else, they're no longer going to put important documents on the Internet anymore.
2.) China will now be put under a microscope. While I'm going to say that any articles about rising stars that end up on the Internet will not have any references to age, people will be keeping caches of any and all articles. Speculation will continually follow them.
3.) The FIG and IOC, long regarded as incompetent, have lost pretty much all credibility. This whole "investigation" was just a dog-and-pony show to put up the pretense that they're doing something and that they do not condone the cheating. They had the same evidence before the Olympics as they did when they started this whole thing. They just hoped that, like all news stories, it would soon fade away for the next big thing. Unfortunately for them, the only way that would have happened is if any team, not necessarily the USA, but any team had won over China. But China won and when a team that most people believe is cheating wins, those people want something done about it. What I wonder is what this will do to Grandi's bid to raise the age limit. When they refuse to enforce the age limit in place now, it's stupid and unfair to impose a higher limit.
Knowing that this decision will be unpopular, the FIG and IOC brought in Yang Yun and Dong Fangxiao from the 2000 Sydney Games. Yang famously said she was just 14 in a documentary aired on state-run television and Dong showed up as a worker at the 2008 Games with papers that suggested she would have been ineligible for Sydney, not to mention that her own blog also supported that. I highly doubt it's still up on her blog, though.
However, the statute of limitations for medal revocation is almost up. And what would be the point now? Some have suggested that China is barred from the 2010 Worlds (being barred from London 2009 isn't much of a punishment because the National Games are also around that time and China never sends their A-listers to the Worlds vs. the National Games). Given the rules in gymnastics, not only would China miss a major competition, but they wouldn't get to qualify for the Olympics. Since the top 24 teams in 2010 get to go onto 2011 and those 12 teams qualify a full team to the Olympics (that is, if I have that right).
But you want my prediction on the absolute outcome of everything? Nothing. Absolutely nothing will happen.
