Kuala Lumpur: Just a few days after last week Korea Open champion Qiao Bin was found to be potentially engaged in age fabrication, BadmintonPlanet.com continued to discover more age discrepancies from Chinese badminton players.
BadmintonPlanet obtained a document showing current World No. 14 women’s doubles pair, Chen QingChen (listed as AGE: 19, 06/23/1997 on Badminton World Federation (BWF) official website) and Jia Yifan (listed as AGE: 19, 06/29/1997 on BWF official website), are actually much older than what were shown on their official profiles on BWF website.
In picture below, Chen Qingchen was listed as being born in 1994, and if this is true, her current age should be 22. In addition, Jia Yifan was listed as being born in 1995 and should be 21 years old this year. As you may have known, Chen/Jia won the 2014, 2015 world girls’ doubles titles, while that tournament has specifically stated only players under 19 are allowed to participate in. Let’s do some math here, if Chen Qingchen’s real age is 22 right now, Chen should have been 20 years old while Jia was 19 in 2014. Therefore, BadmintonPlanet seriously doubt about their eligibilities to participate in the 2014 and 2015 World Junior Championships.
In addition, BWF has listed reigning Olympic Champion Chen Long to be born on January 18, 1989. However, if you watch the video below, China’s chief badminton coach actually said Chen Long was born in 1988. Obviously some individuals have deliberately trying to misrepresent their true age.
Everybody is innocent until proven guilty, as we are not in a position to point fingers to anyone for anything. We really hope BWF could get to the bottom of this potential age fraud scandal and take any necessary actions to prevent players or badminton organizations from lying about their real ages.
BadmintonPlanet is striving to work with anyone to produce accurate, insightful and informative pieces that will protect the integrity of badminton.
