Ma Yanhong
Chinese artistic gymnast (born 1964)
Ma Yanhong (simplified Chinese: 马燕红; traditional Chinese: 馬燕紅; pinyin: Mǎ Yànhóng; born March 21, 1964, in Beijing, China) (also reported in some media as July 5, 1963) is a retired Chinese Olympic athlete. She was the first Chinese gymnast, male or female, to win a gold medal at the World Gymnastics Championships and the Olympic Games.
Biography
Ma began gymnastics at the Shichahai Sports School for Amateurs in her hometown of Beijing. The age at which she started training has been variously reported as six, eight and nine. While her birth date was reported as March 21, 1964 in an International Gymnast feature, and Chinese media also gave this as her birth year, she competed under a false birth date of July 5, 1963.
Ma trained under intense conditions; she was described as rebounding off the uneven bars so many times that wounds opened on her skin, and she was under such strict weight control that her lips cracked from dehydration.
In 1978, her first year with the Chinese national team, Ma made her international debut at the Asian Games, where she shared in the team gold medal and won the uneven bars title. She repeated her success at the 1978 Shanghai Cup, again winning team and bars titles. Ma was a member of the 1979, 1981 and 1983 World Championships teams; she was the Chinese National Champion in 1982. At the 1984 Summer Olympics, Ma tied with American Julianne McNamara to win the gold medal on the uneven bars, and both of them scored a perfect 10.0 in the final.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ma Yanhong” as chinese artistic gymnast (born 1964). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1253638. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964, 1963, 1978 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ma Yanhong” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.