A handful of performances at the Yunnan diving championship received no points from the judges, raising questions from athletes, audiences and diving experts about the judges' professionalism and levels of expertise.

The championship is organized annually by the Yunnan Province government to probe the overall level of its diving competitors. A group of divers at age 13 joined the contest in Honghe Prefecture on August 9 and all received zero points for their first two dives.

When people at the event questioned whether the results were given by professional judges, they lost their temper when videos showed one judge playing with a cell phone and another fast asleep.

Several days later, media outlets including Xinhua reported that one of the judges admitted that he was only a driver for the Honghe Diving Gymnasium and several others were either amateurs or coaches from teams that participated in the championship. The chief judge was also reported as an aerobics teacher of Yunnan Normal University.

In an official notice posted by Yunnan Provincial Sports Bureau on its Website Tuesday, the bureau said that if an athlete's dive failed to reach the required degree of difficulty, he or she would get a zero point.

The notice said because all the athletes in the 13-year-old group were "newly enrolled, too young and trained only for a short period of time," failures were unavoidable.

The notice also said all the judges were qualified and coaches were named as judges in order to let them train divers efficiently in their daily training according to rules of contest. Moreover, a coach could not give marks when his or her diver took the contest, it said.

Videos and pictures that showed judges playing with a cell phone and sleeping were taken during the half-time break, the notice explained.

However, though the bureau said the championship was open, fair and impartial, an unidentified veteran diving judge said the event was out of the ordinary and unreasonable. The judges in the championship seemed unfamiliar with rules of diving at all, he said.

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