China will not tolerate age falsification and has enforced stringent checks on its 70-athlete delegation to the inaugural Youth Olympics in Singapore next month, a top sports official was quoted Thursday as saying.
China has long been accused of athlete age falsification. Earlier this year, its women's gymnastics team from the 2000 Sydney Olympics was stripped of its bronze medal after an investigation found Dong Fangxiao was only 14 at the time. Gymnasts must turn at least 16 during an Olympic year to be eligible to compete.
The delegation going to Singapore will be ''very clean and transparent,'' Cai Zhenhua, vice president of the State General Administration of Sport, was quoted as saying in the official China Daily newspaper.
''We've scrutinized every athlete's age in the delegation for the Youth Olympic Games to make sure there is no one going to Singapore with a fake age,'' Cai was quoted as saying.
Authorities checked six forms of ID for the athletes who range in age from 14 to 18: birth certificates, national ID cards, passports, domestic athlete registration cards, and domestic and international authentication for competitions, the report said. Those under 16 have also undergone bone-age analyses.
The furor over Dong's age was embarrassing for China's government, which runs a massive training program aimed at churning out Olympic champions. China never said who was responsible for faking Dong's age, though the country's top gymnastics official has said the athlete and her family must have been behind it - though it's unlikely a young athlete or her parents could forge official documents.
The issue drew worldwide attention in 2008, when media reports and Internet records suggested some of the girls on China's gold-medal-winning Beijing Olympics team could have been as young as 14. They were later cleared by the International Gymnastics Federation.
A total of 3,500 athletes from 205 countries will take part in the Youth Olympics, founded by the International Olympic Committee in part to interest more young people in participating in sports.
All 26 sports from the Summer Games will be represented in Singapore, but not all events within each sport. Some sports will be staged in a different format. Basketball, for example, will be a 3-on-3, halfcourt game played over three five-minute periods.
