updated 8/25, scroll down for updateFrom
the New York Times article published Aug 24:
Cui Dalin, the vice minister of the General Administration of Sport of China, said He Kexin, the uneven bars Olympic champion, had moved from one team to another last year, and a wrong birth date was written on the registration forms for the new team.
“During the registration, there were some discrepancies in the age of the athlete, therefore that mistake has led to a series of misunderstandings afterward,” Cui said during a closing news conference for the Chinese sports delegation here. “I can say for sure the age of the Chinese gymnasts comply with the rules.”I think we can all breathe easier now that officials are beginning to address the problems that so many have observed. However having spent some time studying the documents, I'm concerned about what I perceive to be a discrepancy. The alleged mistake led to at least three separate Excel spreadsheets, now deleted, showing a birthday for Kexin of Jan 1, 1994. This in itself is interesting. However my interest is in Cui's statement that the change occurred "last year". Last year was 2007, and as alert readers of this blog will recall, the Internet Archive has kept two copies of a document published to sport.gov.cn which establishes Kexin's birthday as 1-1-1994. The problem here is that the Internet Archive saved one of these copies in June of 2006, two years ago. Additionally, when the document was stored in the Internet Archive, the document contained a publication date of January 27, 2006. Neither of these dates is in the least bit consistent with Cui's statement.
update 8/25And that's just the beginning of the problems with Cui's statement. I'll start with a summary, and I'll follow with documents. On this blog, I've listed (over time) four different documents: three Excel spreadsheets and a web page, all deleted from www.sport.gov.cn, the General Administration Sport China web site, and they are all available mirrored or cached online. Two of the documents are after the team transfer that Cui is referring to in his statement: these are the zctc.xls documents. One of them is the web page that documents the team transfer of He Kexin, this is the web page saved in the Internet Archive. The most important document, however, is 05ticao.xls, still saved in the Baidu cache at the time of this writing. Turns out "ticao" is the Pinyin for "gymnastics", so this document is basically "05gymnastics.xls". It predates the team transfer that Cui is speaking to. And all four documents show He Kexin's birthday as Jan 1 1994. How can a mistake a "year" ago made during a team transfer have affected He Kexin's records well before the team transfer, in 2005? Here's a link to Baidu cache of 05ticao.xls (this will expire someday soon, I'm reserving this space for a mirror link). It's a registry of gymnasts for 2005. For the following sectoin, you can copy and paste to search within the document to follow along. The document tells the gymnast totals:
注:总注册1016人;其中确认676人;首注329人;交流11人.
Total registration 1016 people, among which 676
people were previously registered, 329 people are
first-time registrations, and 11 people are "exchange".
These exchanged gymnasts are the exchanges that Cui is referring to in his statement, however, this year was
not an exchange year for He Kexin. This was He Kexin's first registration year, see row 799:
799,"何可欣","女","1994.1.01","北京","北京","北京市体育局","首注"
799, He Kexin, F, 1994.1.01, Beijing, Beijing,
Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau, First Time Registration
Next the document identifies its originator:
体操中心体操部
(Gymnastics Center, Gymnastics Section)
And finally, the document contains its signing date:
2005-3-17
Cui's statement is not a reasonable explanation for the discrepancies that have been found. This list of gymnasts for 2005, published by Cui's organization, the General Administration of Sport China, lists He Kexin as having been born in 1994 during her first time registration. This is before her transfer in 2006, which is listed in this
athlete exchange agreement archived by the Internet Archive in 2006. The team change that Cui cites in his statement as having happened a year ago actually happened two years ago, and He Kexin's original registration with a 1994 birthday in early 2005 is far too early to be explained by a mistake "last year".
end updateNow that Chinese officials have broken their silence on the inconsistencies that are surfacing, I'm hoping we can all expect a statement soon on the case of Jiang Yuyuan, whose name and government ID number appear in a government-hosted spreadsheet I linked to earlier this evening. Alert readers will of course realize that Chinese government ID numbers embed the birth date, hence the string "19931001" inside this government ID number should be addressed in any future clarifications.
In conclusion, here are links to the Internet Archive's 2006 copies of the athlete exchange agreement hosted on www.sport.gov.cn, Ciu Dalin's General Administration of Sport China.
Internet Archive history of documentTranslated version of 2006 copy
