Smash hit

"More information has come to light that did point to discrepancies," Ms Davies said. "We have asked the gymnastics federation to look into it further with the national Chinese federation. If there is a question mark, and we have a concern - which we do - we ask the governing body of any sport to look into ... as to why there is a discrepancy."

The man who uncovered the allegations about the underage athlete told The Times that he was not even a sports a fan, but decided to investigate the issue to determine if Chinese authorities were lying. He eventually discovered that two Excel spreadsheets on the Chinese government’s official sports website - www.sport.gov.cn - that mentioned her name had recently being removed.

"There was a conclusion here," Mr Walker said. "These documents existed, on a state-wide website, and now they don’t exist, and this change has taken place recently. I was interested because these were documents that no-one could find. If there’s information to be found on the internet I’m a citizen journalist - it was a challenge."

He turned to a Chinese search engine, Baidu. In its cache he found both documents. "The listing in there, quite clearly, is He Kexin’s birth date, January 1, 1994," Mr Walker said.

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That makes her 14 years and 220 days old and too young to compete. The lists were compiled by the General Administration of Sport of China.

How aggressive and sustained the IOC-ordered investigation will be remains to be seen. If it did ultimately result in the stripping of gold medals from one of China’s favourite athletes, it would be an Olympic scandal with reverberations far beyond the sport itself.

In July the New York Times published references to articles in the Beijing press in which He was referred to as only 14 years old.

Chinese officials responded immediately by providing the newspaper with a passport copy indicating He had been born on January 1, 1992, but still doubts lingered, not least because the athlete looks barely past puberty.

When asked about her recently - and before He’s gold medal wins - IOC president Jacques Rogge claimed it was not his organisation’s role to check the age of competitors. "The IOC relies on the international federations, who are exclusively responsible for the eligibility of athletes," he said.

Under his blog name Stryde Hax, Mr Walker wrote: "Much of the coverage regarding Kexin’s age has only mentioned ‘allegations’ of fraud, and the IOC has ignored the matter completely. I believe that these primary documents, issued by the Chinese state ... rise to a level of evidence higher than ‘allegation’. How official are these documents? Pretty dang official - they were issued by the General Administration of Sport of China."

He insists that she is old enough to compete. Asked by journalists about the debate, she said: "My real age is 16. I don’t care what other people say. I want other people to know that 16 is my real age."

Both China and the US came into the Games determined to show the other who was boss. Although China is generally recognised as the leading nation, with a tally tonight of 46 gold medals to the USA’s 27, Americans claim to interpret success by the total number of medals won, which puts their team ahead with 86 to 83. With the scores that close, every last piece of metal is precious – meaning this row could follow He firmly into adulthood.