Leicester, an AP international sports columnist, does a fine job telling this story, and I’d recommend that you have a look at it.

The state-run newspaper China Youth Daily quoted Luo Chaoyi as saying that Dong was eligible in Sydney but then shaved three years off her age after retirement in 2001, and that “this must have been an act by her and her family.”

Such an explanation is barely credible – unless, of course, Dong is a master forger of official documents, which is even less believable. In China, as elsewhere, passports are government-issued. Coaches – and not just in China – have also long falsified ages for girls whose small and supple bodies give them a competitive advantage over larger and older young women. The reverse scenario – that a retired gymnast would pass herself off as a kid – makes no sense.

It also hard to believe Chinese officials didn’t know Dong was underage in 2000. Most of Dong’s childhood was spent within the state-run sports system that churns out medalists for China. Her CV shows she joined a sports school at age 4, a provincial team at 7 and the national team at 10. The regimen in such teams can be so tough that wealthier Chinese parents are now steering their children away from organized sports and Chinese media have been increasingly critical of sausage-factory training methods.

How the IOC will respond to these allegations will be fun to watch. How far is Jacques and his crew willing to go? Well, now that the burden of the falsification has been placed upon “her and her family,” I think it is safe to assume that this is the official Chinese permission that the IOC has been waiting for, and the way is now officially cleared for the IOC to demand that she return her medal. I am hoping that Ms. Dong will tell them all to go piss up a rope!

This piece on age discrepancy reminded me of a couple of stories I am quite familiar with. The ease of falsifying records here in China is one that most people in the west can’t quite imagine, though perhaps after 8 seasons of Jack Bauer and his several busy days on the TV show 24, they have a better handle on it than I did before I came to China.

A woman I know, surnamed Song, found herself during the Culture Revolution with a mingzi that was certainly troublesome – the very same name as a famous cross-strait’s personality. In fact, there is every reason to believe that my Song was named after the last empress of Taiwan. The humbler Song was able to get her name changed on the streets of Beijing back in 1967 for twenty or thirty kuai, though that didn’t keep her from being ‘sent down’ to Guangxi for three years of utter nastiness. “But,” you might say, “that was then and this is now. And now is a whole lot different than then.” Well, in some cases it’s not much different at all, at least when it comes to really needing to have your records updated.

I also know a young man, a minority from the western countryside, who was, officially, born too soon after his older sibling. Although his parents were allowed to have two children, there was a restriction on just how quickly one could have a second child after the first was born. “Too quickly” meant that a penalty could be enforced in the process of apportioning fields. If the second child followed too close on the heels of the first, a farming family could find themselves being only given the field allotment for one of the children. In other words, a family of four might only be allocated the same quota of arable land as a family of three, which could mean a critical loss of food, especially when the products of the fields are for self-consumption; the fruits of one’s land and labors are what gets a family through the long, cold winter. Once you begin to understand this, there is not much mystery to understanding how important a loaf of bread is when given as a gift.

The young man in question was not legally registered at birth, though everyone knew how old he was. If his family had tried to get a birth certificate when he was born, they would have put themselves in a position to be officially audited at some other, higher level beyond their village. As it was, it remained a village issue, and the extra land was allotted and everyone had enough food to eat.

Jump ahead a few years and the family finally gets a certificate that records the boy’s age as being three or four years younger than he actually is. No big deal. He’s the son of farmers, and what does age really matter as long as you have a certificate, even if it is off by a few years?

Jump ahead again a decade or so, the boy at this point a young man, and a very bright young man to boot. He has been fortunately noticed by some people along the way who have helped get him out of the countryside and into a fine education program (not public) in the provincial capital. Through a set of circumstances that no one in his family could ever have dreamed possible, the young man is offered a scholarship to a very good university abroad. There is a stipulation: he must be 18 years old to leave. Big problem! His birth certificate records that he’s somewhere in the last half of his fourteenth year. Whoops! Now what? Well, you head back to the rural township office with the right person as your representative: a big, strong man whom everyone knows and also happens to be afraid of because he can whoop all of their butts, two/three/four at a time. And Goliath happens to be carrying a few bottles of qingkejiu, along with enough money to take everyone of standing in the concrete office out to lunch. And that’s how 3+ years get officially added to a certificate to bring the young man up to his correct age, as well as up to speed on getting out of town. Presently, he is living a life unimaginable to himself and everyone in his former rural orbit. Done!

I also know how this works when the official route is taken. I am close with a small family – a mother and her two daughters – who followed the law because there probably wasn’t a choice. Mom registered their births – two years apart – because she couldn’t afford not to. In other words, she couldn’t buy off the right people along the way, and so she had to follow the rules. If I showed you a photo of a group of young women, you’d say, “Look at those two there! They’re so thin!” And then I’d tell you how they’re from a family of three women that only has a field allotment for two. But they have correct birth certificates and have had them their entire lives. “And man,” I’d say, “You should see those two work!” The skinny engines who could, indeed. How else could they get by living within the shadow of the law?

Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports is also not a fan. In his listing of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics winners and losers: Canadians steal the show, he does a fair skewering of the Russian figure skating silver medalist Evgeni Plushenko for his low-ball comments aimed at U.S. gold medalist Evan Lysacek. But Wetzel saved his best for Plushenko’s apologist, the good Count Jacques:

Plushenko’s comments showed zero respect for his opponents. At the Beijing Olympics, Rogge, the IOC president, ripped Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt for just such a thing when Bolt threw up his hands in celebration before crossing the finish line. “That’s not the way we perceive being a champion,” Rogge attacked.

When asked for comment about Plushenko’s antics, Rogge defended the skater to the Los Angeles Times. “I think he was very disappointed, obviously, and sometimes in disappointment, you express things you wouldn’t express at another time.”

There is one difference in these cases. Plushenko hails from a wealthy, powerful country. Bolt doesn’t. Rogge would never attack a Russian (or American or Chinese) athlete the way he did with Bolt. With the stuffy, elitist IOC, it’s always the same game. Power protects power, and when a suit like Jacques Rogge needs to act tough, you know who is going to get called out.

Actually there are two differences, though Wetzel only pointed out one.

I am a hopeless Phillies fan. Last fall I wrote about it here, a long autobiographical piece that begins at birth, which was noted as being five weeks before the Phils won the pennant (1950) then dropped four straight to the Yankees in the Series. And so, I was born a Phan. For those who know nothing about baseball, or nothing about baseball before they were born, something happened in Philadelphia in 1964 that allowed many of us to understand what it means to plunge headlong into the Abyss. The drama and confusion of history, set and setting, and a society in rapid transition was mirrored on the field at Connie Mack. It was perfectly, tragically Sophoclean.

And about that baseball thing that happened? Well, I’m not going to speak it, since the least mention of it could flare up the flames of Hell and consume me and the currently hapless Phils (just dropped four straight to Houston) whose bats have fallen silent at a time when they need to be loud. I don’t want to be the emitting source of some weird low-frequency bad shit psychic transmission that might morph into the Phils undoing this month. But if you must know, have a look here. Yes, Wikipedia has its very own entry on the “Phold.”

So when I read a Jeff Passan piece yesterday on the Phils newly acquired pitcher Cliff Lee and his recent two losses after five straight wins, all I could do was shake my head. Passan, a youngster, made an outrageous statement:

They [Phillies] were going to win the NL East before Ruben Amaro Jr. fortified the team with an ace [Lee]. They’re going to win the East with Lee, no matter how poorly he pitches.

All I can say is, “Kid, you might have a future in sportswriting, but you still have a lot to learn.” Calling a division winner with 27 games to go is a DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN-ism. Baseball is built on the solid understanding that there is always hope, that there is always a chance, no matter how much the odds are against it. It’s a game without time, without a clock to wind down, which allows for the appearance of the divine right up until the final out. It’s a game chockfull of numbers, but it is the unquantifiable, the uncountable that keeps us in the game until the final out, no matter how many runs your team is up or down. Yes, there are odds, and more often than not the odds tell a solid tale. But it’s the one off that keeps us in our seats, whether it’s in the park, in front of a television or, my personal preference, the radio (these days via internet).

So when someone calls it over with 27 games to go I’m thinking that somewhere this kid’s missed the point of baseball. The only way for Passan to be right would be if the Phils were up by 27.5 games. And the last time I checked, which was two minutes ago, the Phils are only up by six. And in Philadelphia that’s a “red one.”

While I hope that the Phillies are there at the end of the season – and at the end of the Series too – I would not have the audacity to be calling it a lock in the first week of September. And neither would the folks who root for the Marlins. (The Cubs, on the other hand, are another story all together. Though they are not statistically out of their division race yet, we all know that Heaven has crossed them off the waiting list for a miracle. After all, they are the Cubs, which means it has nothing to do with the “numbers” and everything to do with the “divine.”)

To further belabor a belabored point (baseball and the divine) I clearly remember the fifth game of the 1985 NLCS – LA vs St. Louis – bottom of the ninth, 2-2 and switch hitting, backflipping Ozzie Smith stepped up to the plate, batting left-handed. The announcer (perhaps Bob Costas who often had me screaming at the TV when I had the chance to watch a game) said “Smith has never hit a home run from the left side,” and he was right. In 3,009 left-handed at bats Smith had indeed never hit a home run. I also remember exclaiming loudly, “Those numbers don’t mean shit!” which was the reason I was watching the game. And on his 3,010th left-handed at bat, Ozzie ran one down the right field line for a homer and a walk-off win. What were the odds?

As any kid who’s played baseball will tell you, it ain’t over until it is. And sooner or later Jacques Rogge won’t be the lord of the IOC, and maybe then the MLB will have a little more of a future in China. And then, too, perhaps that secret baseball camp in remote Gansu will finally be revealed. Here’s to the next Sidd!

But beyond the oratory, Mr. Hu and other Chinese leaders are now facing a new era in which Deng’s export-led economic model, as well as his iron-fisted political control, face unprecedented challenges. Global demand for Chinese goods has slumped, unrest is on the rise in the industrial heartland, and China is scrambling for a new formula to preserve stability and ensure growth.

Hurt feelings, again? The world’s in an economic mess, and because Deng reformed and opened things China finds itself bobbing in the same leaky boat. If this is the reason the cabash has been put on the NYT, then we’d better get ready for the rest of the world’s access to blink off, on, then off again too. Reformed and opened, indeed. Let’s get Jacques Rogge back here to get this thing fixed. Where’s the IOC when you really need them!

One reporter quoted IOC president Jacques Rogge as saying “foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China. There will be no censorship on the Internet.”

Davies suggested that Rogge, who is Belgian, may have not been completely precise when he spoke because he was using English, which is not his native tongue.

“There’s been no change in the IOC’s position,” Davies said. “Again, I think we are trying to hang on every single word often spoken by people whose mother tongue isn’t English. Let me be clear again: The IOC would like to see open access for the media to be able to do their job.”

If this is how they deal with problems, no wonder they’re neck-deep in them. Would it surprise anyone if the IOC folks showed up at the next press conference with top hats, wands and a reeking hutch of fuzzy rabbits. Or maybe Jacques doing card tricks, in French.

The NYT, and just about everyone else, is reporting the words that Jacques Rogge told the Agence France-Presse two weeks ago: “For the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China. There will be no censorship on the Internet.” And there will be fair winds and following seas all the way to the closing ceremony, right Jacques?

Over at the China Law Blog, a must read blog for those wanting to keep up with the pitching fields of law in China, five of the links to stories commenting on this most recent bit of high stakes state fibbing are blocked.

The bigger stories of reporting about the oppressive tactics used by the host country will not be coming out until after the Games, when the press who are here have returned home and will feel free to report their experiences without the fear of being further restricted by talking unflatteringly of the host country during the Olympics.

This is a much larger problem for China, since it is pretty clear that there will be international repercussions. Future international events will, no doubt, sidestep China as a host as it becomes perfectly clear that promises at every level are worth little to nothing. Why can’t China see this? Beats me. Beats a lot of others too.

PS: my internet connection in Tianjin has just slowed down to the speed of a late-90s dial-up.

During the opening ceremony of the Athletes’ Village on Sunday, the housing complex was invisible from the nearby main Olympic Green.”No, it doesn’t really look so good, but as I said, yesterday was better,” said Gunilla Lindberg, an International Olympic Committee vice president from Sweden who is staying in the Athletes’ Village. “The day I arrived, Tuesday, was awful.”

If you remove the Olympic references, this could be someone talking privately to their doctor about the size of their tumor or a persistent rash that just won’t go away. It is also a poor attempt at spin: it’s better now than it was on Tuesday, therefore it will be much better in 12 days. Good luck with that one, Gunilla. You’re going way out on the limb here, and the guy with the saw is the one who’s telling you to believe that you’re not going to fall. Faith is fine, as long as it’s offset by reason, and the folks at the IOC have shown very little sense of ‘balance’ when it comes to just about anything involved with these Olympics.

Two weeks ago when I arrived in Beijing at 8 AM on a flight from Paris, I looked out the window as the plane landed and thought …. Well I won’t tell you what I thought, but it was neither a new thought nor a flattering one. Yesterday (July 27), when my wife arrived on a flight that included many French Olympic athletes, she had the same reaction.
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One thing that has impressed in my decade here in China has been the level of recycling. The stacked-impossibly-high tricycle carts are truly impressive, and that work falls to migrant workers. Earlier this month recycling stations in Beijing began closing and the recyclers cleared out along with the rest of the migrant population, and this is another misfortune of the event. Today there was this from Reuters:

A relentless campaign by Beijing to present a sanitised, modern city to millions of Olympic Games visitors has led to a government shut down of scores of garbage recycling centres that provide these migrant workers with an income.

Besides this displacement of the people who keep the city cleaned up, there is the question of where all the trash from the Olympic crowd will go. Perhaps, somewhere, there’s a new hole, and, perhaps, it’s Olympic Green.

One I.O.C. commissioner, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid further complicating the situation, said matter-of-factly that Chinese officials had “put a tourniquet” on the Olympics.

“Had the I.O.C., and those vested with the decision to award the host city contract, known seven years ago that there would be severe restrictions on people being able to enter China simply to watch the Olympics, or that live broadcasting from Tiananmen Square would essentially be banned, or that reporters would be corralled at the whim of local security, then I seriously doubt whether Beijing would have been awarded the Olympics,” the commissioner said.

That these issues are still being dealt with as the main event bears down upon us – and ‘bear down’ is the proper verb – speaks to the bumbling incompetence of the IOC. That they could not have foreseen in 2001 that the situation could possibly look as it does today tells us more about them than it does about China.

No matter how this whole thing ends up shaking down, it’s a pretty safe bet that the IOC, at the very least, will be rewriting their rule book, though what they should be doing is figuring out how to dismantle the organization, since they’ve proven that they cannot be trusted as they blunder about like Instamatic tourists in the seething middle of world politics. If they thought hookers and bag men in Mormon country buried them with bad press, they haven’t even seen buried yet. Wait until they try to explain this one away to the very people – the press – whom they’ve set up for the biggest fleecing. And when it comes to last words, we all know who will have it.

Poor Jacques. He should have spent more time boning up on history. Or the movies. If he had, he would have learned that what Beijing is on the middle of is the latest state-of-the-art-and techno-supported fear-of regime-change imperial clampdown, just like in the movies, where everyone’s watching everyone else to see if somewhere a crack appears, and, if it does, trying to figure which side would be best to come down on. This is the historic moment that all Chinese leaderships brace for. This is the truth behind the history of Mandates, as far back as you want to go. And it’s full of tension, as it always is. Any perception of weakness can be taken as a sign to move by … ? Well, I have no idea. It’s just a movie. Maybe Richard Gere at the head of an army of silk-scarved Caucasian Buddhists in sporty Fiats, intent on swooping down on Beijing, but instead, stuck in traffic on the 117^th Ring Road, somewhere west of Datong. It’s a fiction, but believable enough, as, in fact, they all are. And it’s really not too hard to swallow once you realize that the IOC gave the Olympics to Beijing without substantive and effective checks concerning very serious issues that needed to be addressed, and now, billions (and billions and buckets of billions) of dollars later, the show’s about to open. And nobody’s very happy. And Richard Gere just pulled over, somewhere west of Datong, looking for a juice bar that’ll serve smugly smiling white guys.

I think I might be on to something here. I’ve already got a working title.

It’s clear that he was in SF to get the torch through the city, using any route possible as it turned out, and the fewer the spectators, the better. My guess is his prime directive was to get a good photo of the torch with the Golden Gate in the background, and the day’s strategy was launched with that in mind. He got them too, but, for the life of me, I can’t find them now on Xinhua. I saw four within a few hours, no blue gym-suited guys in sight. If I recall correctly, two of the photos were of a young man running w/Flame, one of a one-legged African-American with a springy prosthetic legs also running w/Flame, and one of the pair of them together: the torch in each photo and the bridge, I believe, in three. For someone, maybe Mr. Jiang, there will always be San Francisco.

Money shots are big when you get them. Even bigger when you get them when the clock’s running down. Jiang came through in the clutch, which was confirmed by SF Mayor Gavin Newsom presentation of a gift to Mr. Jiang, which appears to be a plate. There is another photo of Jiang with Peter Ueberroth, Chairman of the US Olympic Committee, each of the men gripping the torch in a nobody’s-taking-this-from-us pose. Everyone appears to be pleased. Jiang looks good for the cameras, brightly buffed and smiling. So, there’s no reason for me to doubt that they are, indeed, Jiang’s hands handling the lantern of universally shared dreams and uniformly lit passions, even though I can’t see his face. This was Jiang doing his duty. Well done to the good comrade!

When The Flame left for Buenos Aires I took a bit of a break. The southern half of the ball, leastwise Argentina, was probably going to be much more of a sleeper – torch through streets, people happy to see it, Sgt Rock and the blue guys having a jog. Nothing much to report there. If there’s not struggle and contradiction, where’s the news? So I slacked off, just read the headlines, all of which concurred that it was A-okay, full-flame ahead, Argentina a snap and some good photos too.

But today as I dug a little deeper, I came up with a genuine start. Liu Jingmin, who is also BOCOG Executive Vice-President, delivered The Flame in Buenos Aires for Leg 7. And Leg 8 in Dar es Salaam too. No Jiang. It’s hard to know how to read this, when the information is so incomplete. Or maybe I just haven’t been able to find it, fair enough, but I must tell you, I’ve really been looking. But if you find out the answer, let me know. Jiang was there at the SF airport, and, then what? My barometer, my go-to-guy for gauging official response through photo observation, just gone.

Is there something else going on? Hard to know, but without any news my thoughts go wild. There’s probably an explanation that doesn’t portend disaster, but you never really know for sure in matters like these. Maybe they divided the international legs of the relay between two or three front men, and then drew straws to see who had to go first? Did Jiang draw the ‘shortie’ and get Phase 1 – Northern Hemisphere, full of Europeans and their spawn? If that were the case, bad luck for Jiang. Drawing straws is not always the way to go on things like this. Perhaps that’s a lesson learned. Then again, maybe not. It’s hard to know.

I was just getting used to his embattled look – the bags beneath his eyes, the face in early San Francisco more lined with stress and irritation than the joy we saw in Kazakhstan and Petersburg. Though he wasn’t all joy and light to start out, by the end of the day trip with The Flame back at the airport, he looked pretty good, like the man who’d escaped from a fire, still beaming shiny, amazed at all his good luck.

I suppose it was all part of the arrangement, and not some unintended “reroute” – that all along Liu Jingmin was planning to take the torch in Buenos Aires, and that Jiang was scheduled for a well-deserved break. But it’s hard to pin down when it’s not in the papers, and that turns little things into tricky business. Like the next time you see him, do you say hello?

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And from the “It’s not about the politics, it’s about the sports, right?” bag comes this one from Xinhua and the Boss of the IOC:

The absence of political leaders in the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games will only hurt the country’s or the region’s athletes, said International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge here on Friday.

The athletes would be disappointed if their political leaders cannot applaud for them, Rogge told a news conference.

Sometimes it more than just a little confusing. First it’s “No,” and then it’s “Well, yeah, but only kinda,” then its, “Well no, not really, it’s the athletes, buuuuut it’d be really great if whatshisname could come.” Trying to make a decision based on solid information is getting harder to do by the day.

I need to start watching more baseball.