The power of blogging - Exposing underage Chinese gymnasts.

How more evidence against the Chinese gymnsasts was found by a random internet/security guy using only the internet and some search engines.

How hacker found proof of He Kexin's age - Off The Field - News - Olympics:

"...In his spare time Mike Walker likes to find things on web servers that were never meant to be found.

On Monday, after curiosity got the better of him, the 33-year-old computer security consultant toiled for hours without success, as he tried to dig up more information about the allegedly under-aged Chinese gymnast He Kexin.


...On Google's cache he found evidence of a record of He Kexin's birth on a spreadsheet belonging to the General Administration of Sport of China - the country peak sports body.

But the data had been removed.

On the Chinese search engine Baidu, he went one better. He found two caches of Excel spreadsheet which had been published on the web and both of them showed He Kexin's birthday as January 1, 1994.

The cache is the snapshot of web pages crawled by a search engine spiders which map the web and database their findings.

The following day on Google's Chinese search engine, google.com.cn, he found yet more cached spreadsheets from the General Administration of Sport of China also showing the birth date as January 1, 1994.

This would make the tiny gymnast - who won two gold medals at the Olympics - 14 years old. Her Olympic credentials list her birth date as January 1, 1992, which would make her 16.

..."I put it on Blogger (a free Google blog service) and went out to dinner and the world came calling."

As a direct result of Walker's findings and the resulting press coverage that it sparked, the International Olympic Committee yesterday announced that it had called for a review of the age falsification allegations surrounding China's dual gold medal gymnast..."

Also of note, this Chinese gymnast admitted on national TV that she was underage when she won the bronze in the 2000 games, indicating that this type of age falsification is probably old hat for the Chinese teams.

Records Say Chinese Gymnasts May Be Under Age - NYTimes.com:

"Yang Yun of China won individual and team bronze medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and later said in an interview on state-run television that she had been 14 at the time of those Games. A Hunan Province sports administration report also said later that she had been 14 when she competed in Sydney."