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Posted at 12:11 a.m., Friday, April 17, 2009

Chinese school accused of fraud at soccer tourney

By CHI-CHI ZHANG
Associated Press Writer

BEIJING — A Chinese high school team that won an international girl's soccer tournament last week in Turkey had secretly bulked up its squad with players from the junior national team, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The team from Daping Junior High beat other high school squads from Turkey, Brazil, Sweden, and Italy in early round matches, before defeating a team from France in the semifinals and a German side in the final, Xinhua said.

While several of the junior national team players did attend Daping, the bulk of the team representing the school was made up of junior national team players who did not attend the school, according to the report issued late Thursday.

According to the official regulations posted on the International School Sport Federation's Web site, all players participating in the tournament must be enrolled full time in the schools they played for.

The claim is yet another allegation of systemic cheating in Chinese sports through falsifying athletes' credentials. Several of China's gold medal-winning female gymnasts at last year's Olympics were widely suspected of being underage, although they were later cleared by officials of the sport's world governing body.

In early March, provincial sports authorities reported after examining X-ray bone analysis that about 20 percent of 15,000 young Chinese athletes had lied about their ages.

Yi Jianlian of the NBA's New Jersey Nets is also widely reported to have falsified his age on Chinese documents to make him appear younger and therefore qualified for junior tournaments. Late last year China's Sports Ministry reported that it found 36 players in China's professional basketball league whose dates of birth may have been altered.

Dong Hua, a spokesman for the Chinese Football Association, said officials had noted reports of the latest incident but offered no further comment.

The Chongqing Sports Bureau and Education Bureau are currently investigating the case, according to China's largest sports newspaper, Titan Sports.

Calls to both offices went unanswered late Friday.