Saturday, August 23, 2008

International Olympic Committee (IOC) Ignores the Evidence

Despite being presented with a variety of documentation that clearly evidences fraud on the part of the Chinese government, the IOC chose to accept Chinese passports as final documentation of the ages of the Chinese gymnasts. This was not an unsurprising result, but a gutless one. Despite the clear documentation that He Kexin is only 14 years old, the IOC decided to duck controversy and not embarrass the Chinese government. The Chinese government statement questioning the veracity of documentation on the Internet was disingenuity at its best. I suppose the purported outrage of the families of these young children was yet one more part of the sham that has been perpetrated by the Chinese government. We all know that governments lie to achieve political and other objectives. We have been subjected to a five-year war in Iraq that was based on misrepresentation of evidence to the people of this country and the world.

There has been the more documentation of He Kexin’s age on the web site of the Internet security specialist who helped bring the fraudulent documentation to worldwide attention. "What you're seeing above is a document which was removed from the Chinese government server www.sport.gov.cn, listing He Kexin's birthday as 1994-1-1, saved in The Internet Archive (last link). The Internet Archive is a U.S. based non-profit organization which collaborates with the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress in its mission to perform historical web document preservation. This is just one more document source to pile on top of Google, Google.cn and Baidu. Take a look at the Google Translated version of the Internet Archive's copy of this document, and try to look up He Kexin's age."

What was noteworthy for me was the worldwide attention to my last two posts. People from a dozen different countries read these posts, even two from China. The issue is settled and nothing will be done. Cheating at the Olympics is far from new, and far from over. Multiple gold winner at the Sydney Olympics, Marion Jones is now serving time in a federal penitentiary for lying about her use of illegal substances. Shot-putters at recent Olympics cannot come close to matching throws from the 1970s when steroid use was rampant. On to other topics.

2 comments:

Dana said...

There will always be those who will go to any length to "win" - due to their personal drive and due to the expectations of their country.

Anonymous said...

It was so unfair to the Americans. What if one of the Americans had really been 13 or 14? I wonder if the China Government would have let them compete? Of course not. I say, "Watch out in 4 years." The Americans will be back!!