YANG YUN The 2000 Olympic Games: A Chinese gymnast won medals & captured hearts.
Her passport said she was 16. She says she was 14.
In this interview from state-run Chinese television,
evidence of China's habitual deceit comes straight from the source.
September 22, 2008: The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics again raised a myriad of questions about the practices, policies, and integrity of the Chinese government. One such question that loomed over the games arose around the sport of womens gymnastics.
According to the rules of the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG), the governing body of gymnastics, in order to compete at the Olympics, gymnasts must turn 16 some time within the year of the games. This rule was born from an effort to curb unethical training practices employed by countries like the former Soviet Union, wherein the government would remove toddlers from their families, raising them in harsh, intense gymnastic training facilities. From as young as two and three, these children were forced into gymnastics, their childhoods spent subjected to conditions that proved to be both physically and psychologically harmful. The training was so intense that their bodies tended to peak by the age of twelve and thirteen, stunting their growth and causing severe damage to their growing bodies. They were often forced to train and compete despite suffering debilitating injuries.
Perhaps more difficult to quantify is the psychological hardship they were forced to endure on top of these harsh physical conditions. In many cases, they were denied access to their families, were punished severely if they did not perform well, and were often reminded that the fate of their families' well-being rode solely on their shoulders. Families were denied care if their children did not perform adequately and were only rewarded when medals were won. While this could mean riches for the families of gymnasts who won gold medals, concern arose about all the gymnasts who fell along the way, who succombed to the rigorous training they were subjected to as children.
In an effort to protect athletes from such intensive training practices, a rule was put in place to ensure that training methods would evolve to ensure that gymnasts' abilities peaked at the safer age of sixteen. Former Soviet nations have changed their ways, but unfortunately, China has refused to acknowledge their responsibility to safeguard their athletes' well-being. Instead, they continue to take young children from their families, subject them to these harsh conditions, causing the athletes to reach the height of their abilities at an age well below the international standard of sixteen. How do they get around the rule? Simple - all the Chinese government has to do is alter the athlete's passport. Adjust a single digit in their birthdate and suddenly, all evidence of foul play disappears.
Or so they thought.
Rumors had always rumbled about Chinese athletes being underage, but rarely could anyone find any evidence to prove such allegations. That changed in 2008, thanks to dedicated journalists and average citizens who turned to the Internet to find the truth. There they found a multitude of information that clearly illustrated China's habitual censorship of information and manipulation of the truth.
But while everyone was looking for information relating to the athletes on the 2008 Chinese gymnastics team, evidence arose about another Chinese athlete from yesteryear - Yang Yun, the wunderkind who competed for China at the 2000 Sydney Games. She came out of nowhere, surprising everyone by competing head-to-head with gymnastics superstar Svetlana Khorkina. She came away from the games with two medals and was an instant media darling back home.
At the time, Yang Yun's passport said she was sixteen years old. But thanks to a video that recently surfaced on the Internet, we now know she was only fourteen.
The video in question is a short biography of Yang Yun which was produced by state-run Chinese television. In it she discusses her experiences at the Sydney Olympics, as well as her struggles with multiple injuries after the games that ultimately led to her retirement in 2003. Both the narrator and Yang Yun herself say quite clearly that at the time of the games, she was only fourteen years old, not sixteen as her passport stated at the time.
But beyond just the question of age, this video also illustrates clearly the kind of physical damage endured by the athletes subjected to China's gymnastic training program. During the interview, Yang Yun talks about her experiences dealing with five metacarpal fractures in a period of only two years. During that time, she kept training and kept competing, meaning her hands never had time to properly heal before she was forced to return to gymnastics. This draws an interesting comparison to American gymnast Paul Hamm, who recently suffered a very similar injury shortly before the Beijing Games. He was forced to withdraw from the games, whilst talk raged that such an injury might threaten his career. Imagine suffering that injury five times and being forced to keep going.
For the first time, this interview with Yang Yun is being presented with English subtitles, so the world can see the truth about China's pattern of behavior. Right now, the FIG is investigating five of the six women on China's gymnastics team to determine if they are under the age of sixteen. Their passports say they are, but media reports and Chinese government documents all say otherwise. Jacques Rogge, President of the International Olympic Committee, has said that if any gymnasts are found to have violated the rule, their scores will be stricken from the record books and their medals will be stripped. He claims the IOC's reaction to age violations would be the same as their reaction to steroid use, and that if evidence of past fraud is uncovered, those medals will be removed as well. According to IOC regulations, there is a sixteen-year statute of limitations, so any competitors caught cheating within the last sixteen years are subject to these penalties as well.
With that in mind, we present this as evidence of China's continued efforts to thwart the age restrictions, their repeated abuses of the integrity of sport, and their habitual attempts to manipulate the truth and deceive the world.
