This Week in China Sports: NFL Draft, new CBA champion, Olympic gymnasts stripped of Sydney medal
Friday, 30th April 2010 ~ Maggie ~ Link ~ Comments (0)
Ed Wang was, indeed, picked up in the NFL draft. He went to the Buffalo Bills with the 140th pick, becoming the first Chinese-American drafted by an NFL team. Titan Sports News, China's top sports newspaper, featured Wang on its front page.The Guangdong Southern Tigers beat the Xinjiang Flying Tigers 103-94, winning their sixth Chinese Basketball Association title. Guangdong took the series 4-1. Only the Bayi Rockets, the Chinese army team, have won more titles (8), and Guangdong has been the CBA champion all but one of the last seven years. (Xinhua)
Bob Donewald, coach of the Yao Ming-owned Shanghai Sharks of the CBA, was tapped to coach the Chinese men's national basketball team through the end of the year (Washington Post). Donewald coached NCAA basketball at several different Midwestern universities throughout the 80s and 90s. He will lead a Yao-less team at the world championships in August and the Asian Games in November.
The International Olympic Committee stripped China of its bronze medal in the gymnastics team competition in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, after Dong Fangxiao was ruled to have been underage. The bronze now goes to the United States team. Ironically, Dong was outed by her accreditation papers for working as an official at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. That paperwork has her birth date as January 23, 1986, and not January 20, 1983, as she had declared in Sydney. Olympic gymnasts must turn 16 in the year they compete in an Olympics, per restrictions set by the Federation Internationale Gymnastique (AP via ESPN).
Kenny Huang is NOT denying rumors published in the Sunday Mirror that he is in talks to buy Liverpool Football Club. He only denies speaking to a reporter from the paper, and said he would not comment on the rumor.
China may not have a team in the FIFA World Cup, but they do have a presence. Many of the South African flags currently selling well in the host country, are made in China and apparently the imports were not quite printed right (Mail & Guardian)
Tags: basketball, Bob Donewald, CBA, FIFA World Cup, Guangdong Tigers, gymnastics, IOC, Kenny Huang, NFL, Olympics, Shanghai Sharks, Xinjiang Tigers, 黄建华
Did China trade votes to get the 2008 Olympics?
Wednesday, 21st October 2009 ~ Maggie ~ Link ~ Comments (0)
Rogge visits with Chinese president Hu Jintao on his trip to China last week
"The Beijing Olympic bid committee decided on a tactic of strategic alliance-making. We would link Chinese support for Rogge in exchange for European committee members' support for Beijing," Yuan writes. "Of course, we also made some promises to link up with some of our friends in supporting Rogge. This tactic was our overall strategy."
Rogge and Beijing were selected at the same IOC meeting in Moscow. The IOC, not at all surprisingly, denies the accusation, pointing out that Rogge was elected by a "large majority," so China's lone vote didn't make the difference. But Yuan's assertion that China corralled "some of our friends" to support Rogge weakens that defense considerably.
Yuan says there was no written agreement, so evidence would be hard to come by (Hmm… sounds like another Chinese sports corruption case--Corruption scandal hits Chinese diving).
I'm not too familiar with the inner workings of the IOC, but it all sounds pretty likely to me. On the one hand, you have an international organization that is driven as much by politics and commerce as it is by sports, and operates with no real oversight. On the other hand, you have a country that desperately wanted to host the games, with a bid committee full of people who surely know how to leverage political power in underhanded ways, and who operate with no real oversight. Too bad Rod Blagojevich is headed to prison—he would have made a great IOC committee member.
News of the accusations in the memoir is coming out just after Rogge gave a lot of face to Chinese leaders in sports and politics, sitting near Hu Jintao at the opening ceremony for the Chinese National Games, and stopping by the Shanghai Masters tennis tournament.
It's an interesting story, but behind it there's another one--what happened to Yuan Weimin that made him want to rat out the Chinese Olympic Committee?
Rogge/Hu Jintao image: Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affaris
Tags: Beijing Olympics, corruption, IOC, Jacques Rogge, Shanghai Masters, Yuan Weimin
IOC investigating ages of Chinese gymnasts
Friday, 22nd August 2008 ~ Maggie ~ Link ~ Comments (0)
Will He Kexin have to give this medal back?
The International Olympic Committee has launched an investigation into the ages of gold medal-winning gymnasts He Kexin (何可欣) and Yang Yilin (杨伊琳), according to multiple media reports. Accusations have been leveled that the hosts cheated by faking age records in the sport, which requires that athletes be turning 16 or older in the year they enter Olympic competition.
If the IOC finds that He and Yang are underage and strips China of medals they won, that would cost China both of its women's gymnastics golds—the team title and He's uneven bars gold—and two bronzes, won by Yang in the uneven bars and the all-around competition.
The Associated Press claimed to have found archived reports (later scrubbed from the Internet) from last November in Chinese state media Xinhua, stating that He was 13 in 2007. More recently, some digging by an American computer security expert revealed more records indicating that He is underage.
Related: China, US medal competition heats up
He Kexin image: Boston Globe
Tags: Beijing Olympics, cheating, gymnastics, He Kexin, IOC, Olympics, Yang Yilin
Another Countdown Begins
Tuesday, 25th March 2008 ~ Maggie ~ Link ~ Comments (0)
Despite tight security, disruptions occurred during BOCOG president Liu Qi's speech and during the run of the first torchbearer, Alexandros Nikolaidis. Nikolaidis handed off to Luo Xuejuan, an Olympic swimmer and the first Chinese national to carry the flame.
Image: BOCOG
Tags: BOCOG, IOC, torch relay