- September 22nd, 2008 A video is released on this blog showing a translated interview with Olympian Yang Yun. The product of collaboration between myself, a volunteer translator and Heather Lawver, the video is a taped confession of age falsification in the Sydney Olympics; the final exhibit in a string of primary documents clearly demonstrating organized sporting fraud.
- September 24th, 2008 The IOC expands its age falsification investigation to include the Sydney Olympics.
Today, the press is reporting the the result of the IOC's investigation: a medal presentation ceremony to the US Sydney gymnastics squad, bronze medals delivered a decade late.
It's a touching story and one I'm proud to be a part of. As I read the reporting surrounding the event, however, I continue to be perplexed by the version that is being put forward.
FIG [...] investigated whether underage gymnasts competed for China at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, but found no evidence of wrongdoing. As they pursued those claims last fall, officials decided to take another look at allegations surrounding the ages of two Chinese gymnasts from Sydney.
- The Washington Post
No evidence of wrongdoing? Certainly voluminous records of wrongdoing were published on this blog. But what did the FIG actually say? Perhaps the Washington Post should read this interview with the president of FIG:
Grandi said it was conceivable that China had cheated in Beijing"
"There was strong circumstantial evidence, certainly, but these investigations are not my job ... I'm not the police or Interpol
- Bruno Grandi, President, FIG
More incredible than the claim that the FIG "found no evidence" is the implicit assertion that the IOC/FIG started investigating on September 24th, 2008, because it was just the right day to start looking into fraud eight years later. I do not believe that the investigation was launched two days after we published the Yang Yun video simply out of coincidence. I will never believe this. To do so means that the risks and sacrifices made by the people within China who worked to leak information to me and other bloggers were meaningless. The truth is clear to anyone who reads this blog's archives and examines the documents presented: state sponsored sporting fraud was committed by the Chinese state in Sydney and in Beijing. The fraud was revealed due to the Chinese state's inability to control the compulsory transparency it forced onto its citizens. And the fraud was ignored due to the inability of the FIG & IOC to engage the expertise necessary to validate electronically obtained documents.
So if it's said nowhere else, let it be said here. To those who risked discovery, imprisonment, and worse to get this information to the world: Thank You. For my part, I did my best to represent you.
If you'd like to read the official Chinese response, try to access this link:
http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=cache:strydehax.blogspot.com
That URL is an attempt to retrieve this blog from the archives of the Chinese search engine Baidu. Visiting the link will result in a forcibly terminated connection via automated Internet censorship; you will simply receive a browser error. And that is the official response.
-stryde.hax
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