BEIJING- The Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) has discovered 26 players who had inaccurately registered their ages playing in its top flight league this season, state media reported on Tuesday.

Suspicions of officials altering the age of athletes has long been a feature of Chinese sport and reports that two Olympic gold medallist gymnasts were younger than stated threatened at one stage to embarrass China at the Beijing Games in August.

The CBA examined the age of all 242 players in the league with the cooperation of the Public Security Ministry, which provides identity information for Chinese citizens.

Funding follows success in China's state-run sports system so officials at city and provincial level have long been suspected of using overage players to help them win tournaments.

The CBA would not be handing out any punishment to those players or their clubs and the result of CBA games the players took part in would remain valid, Liu said. "Falsifying age is an issue left over by history," he said.

"We can't simply charge any particular individual or club for the responsibility." The CBA has reported the results of the investigation to world governing body FIBA, who could decide to invalidate China's results in international tournaments with age restrictions if any of the 26 players had taken part.

"Unveiling the age fakes is a demonstration of our determination to solve the problem," said Liu. "We will register the real information for international games in the future."

New Jersey Nets forward Yi Jianlian is officially 21 but a cloud of suspicion surrounded his age before he was picked sixth by Milwaukee Bucks in the 2007 NBA draft.

At the other end of the spectrum, media reports in the U.S. said Olympic gymnasts He kexin and Jiang Yuyuan were not yet 16, as registered, and therefore ineligible to compete at the Games.

They both won gold at the Beijing Games and were later cleared of any wrongdoing by the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG).