The World Competes

It’s time to dust off any Olympic history books that you might have, because history has changed. The U.S. team of Elise Ray, Amy Chow, Kristin Maloney, Dominique Dawes, Tasha Schwikert-Warren, and Jamie Dantzscher, who originally placed fourth at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, are now bronze medalists. Congratulations!

In 2000, China won the bronze medal. While some of the gymnasts looked young, they were able to prove that they were at least 16 and could participate. If you watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics, does this sound familiar?

In 2008, Dong Fangxiao applied to be an official at the Beijing Olympics. She turned in her paperwork to apply for the job, and guess what… she was not yet 24. Why would that be a problem? While people don’t have to be 24 to be an official at the Olympics, they do have to be 16 to participate in the gymnastic events at the Olympics. Dong was one of the bronze-medal winning gymnasts in 2000. If she wasn’t yet 24 in 2008, that means that she wasn’t yet 16 in 2000, and she wasn’t eligible to participate in those Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee can work very slowly. While they discovered this two years ago, they finally removed the bronze medal from the 2000 Chinese team today and awarded it to the United States, who placed fourth.

Dong Fangxiao did not win any other medals in the 2000 Olympics. She did place below the medal level in some of the other events; I’m assuming that in the official records, she will be disqualified in those events and other Olympians will be upgraded.

As far as the 2008 Olympics go, the IOC still accepts the passports of the gymnasts from that Olympics; however, a blogger did discover documents that showed that a couple of the gymnasts were underage. I personally believe that a couple of the passports were falsified. Should information come out that Chinese gymnasts were underage, those gymnasts would likely lose their medals as well.