Analysis: IOC decision to strip China of 2000 Olympic bronze raises questions about other teams

China's Dong Fangxiao, right, was deemed too young to compete at the 2000 Olympic Games.

AP Photo/Amy Sancetta

Wednesday's announcement that the International Olympic Committee has stripped China of its team bronze from the 2000 Sydney Olympics and will be awarding it to fourth-place U.S. team brings a sense of closure to one very tainted Olympic gymnastics competition.

But what about the others? Since the 1980s, age falsification has been almost as much a part of Olympic gymnastics as sequined leotards. The U.S. is not the only team to have finished behind a team that has had a too-young gymnast competing at the Games.

If the IOC has corrected this wrong, shouldn't it go back and correct all the others? (And there are many, many others.)

Ironically, one team that would benefit from such a correction would be the Chinese. In 1996, China finished fourth behind a bronze-medal winning Romanian team that featured supposedly 14-year-old Alexandra Marinescu.

In 2002, Marinescu confirmed that her birth year had been changed from 1982 to 1981 so that she would appear to be old enough for the Atlanta Games. (In 1996, gymnasts were only required to have turned 15 by the end of the Olympic year. The age requirement was changed in 1997 so that a gymnast had to be 16 by the end of the Olympic year to compete at a World or Olympic Games. It is still in place today).

The Chinese authorities -- not Dong Fangxiao herself, who likely did not know that there was even a minimum age to compete -- were the villains in Sydney. But in Atlanta, the Romanians allowed the exact same thing.

If the 2000 Chinese team is going to lose its medal, shouldn't the 1996 Romanian team also be stripped of the bronze? And if so, shouldn't that medal be given to the Chinese?

Legally, the answer is that there is a 10-year statute of limitations that will prevent further medal stripping. But it's worth taking a look at how the gymnastics record books might have been different if the IOC were to pursue other known cases of age falsification.

There are numerous other cases. What about the Romanians in 1992, who let 13-year-old Gina Gogean compete? (The Romanian newspaper Prosport dug out hospital records that showed Gogean's birth year to be 1978, not 1977 as the Romanian gymnastics authorities claimed during the 1992 Olympics. The Romanians won team silver in 1992 behind the Soviet Unified Team.)

 Or the 1985 Romanians, who collected the World team silver with young Daniela Silivas, who was born in 1972 and not 1970 as claimed? Not to mention all the individual accolades that these too-young-to-compete gymnasts racked up. (These age risks were taken for a reason.) Or the old Soviets, who were also known to pass off a few children as teenagers in their time?

The International Gymnastics Federation now has a choice: it can get rid of the age requirement that has already caused so many problems, or it can continue to let things like this happen. This age requirement should be rewritten, or the gymnastics history books will continue to need corrections.

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