BEIJING — The International Olympic Committee today asked the international gymnastics federation to reexamine whether gold-medal-winning gymnast He Kexin and two of her teammates were too young to compete in the Beijing Games.
"You shouldn't regard this as a formal investigation, but we have asked the international gymnastics federation to look into a number of questions and discrepancies on these cases," IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said. "We have been working with the [Chinese] national federation to really have a full clarification on this topic. We did discuss it earlier in the Games, and we believed we had addressed the issue."
In the Olympics, a gymnast must turn 16 during the year the Games are held.
If He is determined to be too young, she would be stripped of her medals. In the uneven bars competition Monday, she narrowly beat Nastia Liukin of the United States for the gold. She also has a team gold medal.
It is also possible that all of the Chinese women could be stripped of their team gold medals.
The decision to further look into the allegations comes after a series of articles, most recently by the Times of London, said that documents from Chinese sports agencies that had been posted on the Internet showed He is not 16. The British article was based on a Web report by a computer security expert who said he had obtained the documents.
Among those documents are gymnastics registration lists showing that He was born Jan. 1, 1994, though the passport China submitted for Olympic entry listed her birth date as Jan. 1, 1992.
Some of these online documents were the basis of articles last month in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times raising questions about the ages of Chinese athletes, including He.
Several of these documents and stories have since been deleted from websites, including a Chinese news agency report in November that quoted a Chinese sports federation official as saying that He was 13 and a 2012 Olympic prospect.
He was reported to have started her training at the Ditan Sports School in Beijing in 1997 when she was either 3 or 5 years old.
"I don't know who is her mother," said Shang Chunyan, who trained He for three years at Ditan. Shang refused to talk about He's age, referring questions to officials with the Dongcheng District of Beijing, which oversees the school.
