I love the Internet. All the things you can find here. And now there might be a case where an Internet investigator finds compelling evidence that there is a mismatch between the official age of Chinese Olympic Gold medal winner He Kexin (何可欣) as reported by the Chinese government to the Olympic committee and as documented in here passport, and an official document published by the Chinese Sports Authorities 2 years ago (http://www.sport.gov.cn/files/jts/reg2006/zctc.xls), that now have largely been removed and disappeared from the Internet.
As the WSJ reported, among others, Mike Walkers did some Internet research on his own to see if there was evidence that the age might have been misreported. According to her passport her age is Jan 1, 1992, while in the official sports document from 2 years ago her birthday is stated as Jan 1, 1994. The difference is that with the stated passport age she passes the Olympic age limit of 16 years in 2008, while at her potentially different real age she would not have been eligible to participate and win the gold medal.
To see the evidence yourself, follow Mike’s instructions: start by searching Google for all Chinese web sites for Excel spreadsheets containing He Kexin’s name and the word 1994 (site:cn 何可欣 filetype:xls 1994).
You will get one single result, and when you click on it, it’s not even there any longer. You can try the cached version from Google then. However, even though the Google search results indicate that He Kexin is listed in the spreadsheet, when you view Google’s cached version, her name no longer appears. Strange…
Do the same on the Chinese search engine site Baidu.com, and you will get TWO (2) results (spreadsheets at sport.gov.cn with Kexin’s name). Not surprisingly, the new one discovered by Baidu has been been deleted as well. Strange…
If you click on the “HTML” link next to these XLS documents on Baidu (do it yourself!) you can access a cached copy of the document. This means that it was fully available… until recently. Strange…
So, does what does the cached version (copies of these documents) on Baidu have to say about Ms. He? Well, in the Baidu cache, which as of now still contains these document (two spreadsheets published by the Chinese government on sport.gov.cn) both list He Kexin’s birthday as 01-01-1994, making her 14 years old.
You can access the documents directly yourself, either by using the directions above or by clicking these links: cache1 cache2 These documents were issued by the General Administration of Sport of China and you can draw your own conclusions of what is going on here.
I don’t even want to get into the discussion of who might have cheated or not and who would be responsible, I leave this to others. But I think there are 2 important things to consider here for the future. If, at least for the time being, the Chinese authorities have not been able to remove all of this content (or evidence) of the Internet, and it is now being replicated all across the Internet in blogs like this, I guess it is just another indication of how powerful the Internet has become. Be careful with putting stuff out there on the net. Whether MySpace, FaceBook, or any other site, it’s less about the end user license agreement that might give you a fake illusion of feeling secure. You have to be prepared that whatever is out there once, even for seconds, will be out there forever, and probably more often than in just one place.
The other item for food for thought seems to be Google. Google has been critizised in the past for being too cooperative with Chinese authorities regarding data and search restrictions and the privacy of its user data. Seems like in this case they are not sticking out as the keeper of the original version for the longest time, either. And if you continue to follow the story about Google.cn, it gets even more interesting.
