Recently, the 2000 Chinese Olympic team lost their bronze medal after Dong Fangxiao was discovered to be underage. The age discrepancy was discovered when Dong filed paperwork to be an official at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The US Olympic team will receive medals next month. Questions were also asked of the 2008 team; more than one of the athletes were suspected to be underage, although the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) has cleared them (my opinion is that they might mess up and be discovered to be underage in the future).

The Chinese government will make the athletes produce six different forms of ID to prove the athletes’ ages.

This would be good if the Chinese are actually sincere about their hopes to clear age-falsification; however, if this announcement is just for show, and the Chinese government is behind the age deception, then we might not see any changes soon. With the Youth Olympics, perhaps the Chinese won’t be in such a hurry to push their athletes into the wider stage at an earlier age than they are allowed.

The Americans who raced in the women’s 4×400m relay at the 2000 Sydney Olympics have a reason to smile today: they will not have their medals taken away from them, even though their teammate Marion Jones did lose her medals for doping.

It wasn’t until 2003 that the IOC decided to take the medals away from all runners if one of the racers was disqualified. This case also follows precedent: on the gold-medal winning men’s relay team, US runner Jerome Young was retroactively banned from competing in the Olympics after it was discovered that he had been using steroids in 1999.

No word yet as to whether Crystal Cox’s relay teammates from 2004 will lose their medals: it was after the IOC decided to disqualify all of the medalists for the doping violations of one person, but she was an alternate on the team.

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.

The weather is starting to warm up around here (maybe not everywhere, but I live in Arizona), and I’ve started to think about my summer plans. It’s a good time to start thinking about some summer Olympians. While the summer Olympics has some excellent sports, when you think about summer, you can’t help but to think about swimming.

If you were to ask 100 Americans to name a summer Olympian, more than likely, most of them would say Michael Phelps. While athletes like Shawn Johnson and Usain Bolt also come to mind, Phelps piqued the interest of quite a few people in 2008, when he broke the record for the most gold medals won in a single Olympics.

Phelps’ first turn at the Olympics was in 2000, where he competed in the Sydney Olympics at age 15. He didn’t win any medals that year, but he did get some valuable experience, that he put to good use in the 2004 Athens Olympics, where he won six gold and two bronze medals. In 2008, he beat that total, winning eight gold medals, and beating Mark Spitz’s record of seven golds in one Olympics.

Phelps is an ambassador for this summer’s first Youth Olympic Games. He also plans to compete in the 2012 Olympics, but he has said that he doesn’t plan on trying to repeat or better his feat.

Jaques Rogge says that he’s looking for age cheaters at the Youth Olympic Games. The first Youth Olympic Games will be held this summer in Singapore, and will be for ages 14-18. This is a good and noble goal, and I applaud him for it. However, he’ll need to do a better job than he has in the past.

Most of us who watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics may remember the Chinese gymnasts who looked like they were under age. They had “passports” that said that they were old enough to compete. However, one astute person was able to find documents using Google that said that He Kexin, who won gold on the women’s uneven bars, was 14 years old. He Kexin will be eligible to compete in this year’s Youth Olympic Games, but she will need to continue to lie about her age, or she could lose her medals from Beijing (she also won a team gold medal).

One of the Chinese gymnasts from Sydney, Dong Fangxiao, forgot about this. When she turned in paperwork to participate as an official in the Beijing Olympics… Surprise! Her Beijing paperwork says that she would have been 14 at the time of the 2000 Olympics. Yang Yun, another gymnast from 2000, is also suspected to have been underage. In a recent decision by the IOC, Dong Fangxiao has been confirmed to have been underage, and recommendations are now being made to remove her team medal, as well as those of the Chinese team. Once these recommendations are acted on, the US team from 2000 will move up into bronze-medal position.

Hopefully there will be no age cheating, but I’m doubtful. They also plan on looking for drug cheaters.

One of the things I remember most about the 2000 Sydney Olympics opening ceremonies was the little girl, Nikki Webster. Very cute. Every opening ceremony seems to have a cute little girl to sing a song; but what happens to them after the Olympics? We do know what happened to Nikki Webster after the Olympics.

It’s hard to top the Olympics, but Nikki went on to record an album. Her first single, “Strawberry Kisses”, went platinum, and rose to #2 on the Australian Singles charts. The accompanying album, Follow Your Heart, also went platinum. She was later dropped by her record label a few years later.

Like many child stars, Nikki seems to have had trouble making the transition to adulthood. In 2009, she released a new single, “Devilicious”, but it didn’t do so well, peaking at #78. She is working on a fourth studio album with American Independent label Piller Records. One thing is for certain, she is certainly trying to achieve a more mature image than that which she portrayed at the 2000 Olympics. Nikki Webster’s web site has relatively recent pictures, although it doesn’t look like it’s been touched much since last year.