(basketball) More age falsification by Chinese Sports Ministry

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Chinese crackdown finds 36 players lied about their ages
Chinese crackdown finds 36 players lied about their ages - World Sports Report - CBSSports.com

BEIJING -- A crackdown on "age shaving" has found 36 players in China's professional basketball league were older than they originally stated. The results of a crackdown were reported Tuesday in the Sports Ministry's official newspaper, China Sports Daily, but no individual players were named.

Officials have turned over the data to world basketball's governing body, FIBA, and the Asian Basketball Association in hopes of winning their understanding, said Liu Xiaonong, the head of the association's Communist Party committee.

"In the future we will take whatever measures to strictly monitor player registrations," Liu said.

Sports authorities have sometimes been accused of altering players' ages to show them as being younger, mainly to qualify them for youth tournaments. Those false ages stay with athletes and can result in embarrassment and regulatory sanctions when athletes move on to greater success.

The government-backed basketball association last month ordered teams to declare their players' true ages, checking them against a new nationwide police data base.

The opposite practice was alleged in the controversy surrounding the women's gymnastics competition in the Beijing Olympics, when China entered athletes suspected of being below the minimum age of 16 during an Olympic year to be eligible for competition.

The international gymnastics federation eventually cleared the Chinese gymnasts of amending birth records to appear older than they were, but continues to investigate the ages of Chinese gymnasts who competed in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

While a global problem, the falsifying of ages is considered particularly acute in China due to the massive pressure on coaches and officials to produce victories and the apparent ease with which false documents can be obtained.
 
Ugh. There is something wrong when winning is more important then playing honestly. They really need to start cracking down on this. I was quite disgusted with the whole gymnastics scandal, where it was quite obvious to everyone but the Chinese govt. that they were lying.

But this is apparently common. I have a friend who is a Chinese immigrant, and I can't get the story straight, but somehow the birthday the government recorded for her is a month and a half later than her real birthday. So she has to use that birthday for everything, passport, green card, school, and so on. She doesn't compete in sports or anything like that, but everytime anyone asks what her birthday is, she always asks, "my real birthday or my official birthday?" At least they got the year correct.
 
No one says they are going to fix it. But other countries could at least exclude the in-eligible athletes from the competitions. Its not like those athletes are competing for themselves by choice, they are being forced to by their goverment. Best way to teach those governments a lesson is to ban their athletes for cheating.
 

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