14 DAY TRIAL // A hacker, identified as Stryde Hax, while following leads indicating that a couple female Chinese gymnasts participating in the 2008 Beijing Olympics are underage, managed to stumble upon some webpages supporting such scenarios. Thus, he discovered certain inadvertences that could convince even the most skeptical of people that the Chinese Olympic Committee has been playing dirty.
The international Olympic rules say that a girl, in order to be accepted in the gymnastics competition, has to be at least 16. Rumors surrounding the Chinese team have it differently - at least two of the young girls to compete are, in fact, too young to do so. Instead of being 16, several sources, including the New York Times, indicate that He Kexin and Jiang Yuyuan are 14.
The easiest way to determine a public person's age is to search for it on the Internet. So did many but, at least in He Kexin's case, the year of birth is disputed on the gymnast's Wikipedia page, and also on several official Chinese websites set up by the General Administration of Sport of China. Many XLS documents show that Kexin's date of birth is 1.1.1994, and not 1.1.1992, as her passport reads.
Stryde Hax performed several searches regarding the girl's birthday with Google.com, Google.cn and Baidu, the most popular search engine in the country that hosts the Olympics this year. Speadsheets that indicated that the gymnast was indeed 14 were mysteriously deleted soon after the hacker made a screenshot to show that these documents were available. Several cached documents found via Baidu still show official lists released long before the Olympics, which prove that Kexin's date of birth is two years after the one that is said to be genuine at this moment. The fact that some files are still available on cache means that the "mother" pages have been deleted or removed recently.
"At this point, I believe that any reasonable observer already understands that age records have been forged. This story now is really about Internet censorship, the act of removing evidence while at the same time claiming that the evidence is wrong. For the first time I watched search records shift under my feet like sand, facts draining down a hole in the Internet. Will this stand?" comments Stryde on his blog, where he also gives more details on the case.