The Age Scandal

It is known that people's average height varies from country to country and people in  China are shorter than people in other countries. It is also known that female gymnasts are way shorter than average. You can often see them in competition standing next to trainers or other people and are very short. 

Svetlana Khorkina, the seven time  7 time Olympic medalist from Russia seems to be the tallest gymnast so far and she's  at 5-5″ (1.65m).  I remember her from her glory days and she is really tall, compared to the other but even so, she's 5 cm shorter than me and I consider myself of average height.

Height and weight count a lot in women's gymnastics as the lighter and shorter you are, the easier for you it it to do those required exercises. Gymnasts have a special diet and have to watch their weight. I've seen interviews with top gymnasts and eating was always a problem for them. Tell a kid or a teenager that she can't have a slice of cake or a piece of chocolate (almost never) and she can only have half or just a small portion of what she would want to eat. It's not easy and professional gymnasts know that, they are sacrificing a lot. 

Olympic games has an age limit, gymnasts must be 16 in order to qualify. At he  2008 Summer Olympics hosted by Beijing there were some problems regarding three of the Chinese gymnasts age. There were suspicions that  iang Yuyuan, Yang Yilin and He Kexin were younger than 16 and that was visible with the naked eye. 

Watch the video and see for yourself what He Kexin looked like and pay attention to the end of the video where she's next to her team mates. She looks like their younger sister. At the time of the competition He was 4-foot 8-inches tall and weighing 72 pounds.  Her passport says her date of birth is January 1, 1992, which mad her 16 at the time of the competition but her date of birth was forged to make her older. 

Huffpost had discovered documents published online proving He Kexin's real age, documents that disappeared when the scandal broke out. 

 China has a rich history of age falsification in Olympics competition,  especially in gymnastics. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, three years after  the minimum age was raised to 16 in gymnastics, Chinese gymnast Yang  Yun competed and won a bronze medal in the uneven bars (coincidentally  this event is also He’s specialty).  Yang’s passport said she was born  on December 24, 1984 and turning 16 in the year of the Games, making her  eligible.  She later confessed in a television interview that she was  only 14 at the time of the competition and that she and her coaches had  lied about her age.  [source](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/scandal-of-the-ages-docum_b_118842?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAAU2iDr861f4VRxQUlX1h6AIxyIaZL-d1zQiVyihDKuyuJ-KbguGrSpv2CzieE8GCbDMcJgaXEfWpzF_l0sIKtIl2sl7DSHdcHM2b1lBrdthep48-0fW0xeLbzPFTmjR7RSKwhRVvy3wPn-bod8Nmc_JEr6JcezAWokd_wxoG1Gb)

Fake it till you make it, right? I was thinking these days that most of the sports are not what they look like. There's doping, cheating and can't name one that is clean and honest.