Citing Historical Results from the 2009 East Asian Games

Every durable citation starts with the ratified result book, not a press tally or a cached web page. The event closed in December 2009. All subsequent medal changes from doping cases are part of the permanent record and cannot be retroactively applied to a book printed that month. You are not just collecting a number. You are pinning down which edition of the number is real.

Rule out preliminary results that still sit online after corrected copies were issued. Press tallies routinely miss tie-break adjustments that reshuffle the medal table. Verify against the final result book and note the date of access for any online source you consult.

The EAGOC published a multi-volume result book after the Games. That physical set, held by national Olympic committees and a few sports libraries, is the permanent historical record. It contains the ratified results for all 22 sports, with event-level detail, athlete names, times, scores, and final placings. Digital scans circulate online, but their provenance is the problem. A PDF found through a search engine may be a pre-ratification draft that was superseded within days of the closing ceremony.

Use the result book for medal table data, delegation standings, and event schedules as executed. Do not use it for full delegation lists. It lists medal winners but does not provide a complete start-list with non-medal performances. That gap is one of the authority gaps in the 2009 record. For any bibliographic entry, treat the result book as a multi-volume work with the publisher as the 5th East Asian Games Organising Committee, Hong Kong, 2009.

A durable citation ties three elements together: the source type, the version marker, and the access date. Write the citation so that a researcher in 2040 can reconstruct what you saw. The source type is "result book" or a named online repository. The version marker is the ratification status: "final ratified edition" or a date stamp on the PDF. The access date is the day you downloaded or viewed the file.

This matters because cached preliminary results on old organising committee microsites still rank for sport-specific event queries. A result you pull from a cached page in 2026 may show a medal tally that was corrected in a later release never picked up by the web crawler. The failure mode is a version conflict. A journalist cites an early press tally that counted gold medals without applying the tie-break rule used in the official table. A Wikipedia editor copies a medal count from a news article that used a provisional start list. Your method must survive both. State the source, its version, and when you accessed it.

Build the citation this way. Start with the organising committee as author. The full legal name is Hong Kong 2009 East Asian Games Limited, but the published volumes carry the 5th East Asian Games Organising Committee imprint. Use EAGOC in the author field. The title is the sport name followed by Official Results, for example Athletics Official Results. The date is 2009, with no month needed because the book set was issued as a single post-Games release. The publisher location is Hong Kong.

If you are working from a digital scan, add the format and the access date. The format is PDF. The access date is when you opened the file. Do not link to the file location; URLs for these scans break within months. A researcher who needs the source can use your bibliographic detail to find another copy. This approach holds for every sport on the programme, from aquatics at Kowloon Park Swimming Pool to volleyball at Hong Kong Coliseum.

Three-Step Workflow

Compare any source you find against the final ratified result book. First, identify the source type: result book, press tally, federation archive, or cached web page. Second, check the version marker. A press tally dated 10 December 2009 is a provisional count that predates the closing ceremony on 13 December 2009 and any post-event result ratification. A cached results page from the old EAGOC site may carry a timestamp of 8 December 2009, before the last day of competition. Third, cross-reference the medal table against the result book. Any discrepancy in gold medal counts or delegation rankings is a red flag.

The Tie-Break Trap

The most persistent version conflict involves the tie-break rules. The official table ranks delegations by gold medals first, then silver, then bronze. Press agencies sometimes published tables ranked by total medals. That gives a different delegation order and creates a phantom discrepancy that looks like a data error. Check which ranking convention your source uses before you assume the numbers are wrong. The confusion pair here is the East Asian Games versus the Asian Games. The continental event uses the same ranking rule, but the 2009 East Asian Games was a nine-delegation affair with uneven competitive depth. A medal table that implies competitive balance across all nine delegations is misleading.

Preliminary result errors enter the citation chain through three common vectors. The first is press tallies published during the Games. News agencies working to daily deadlines pulled data from timing system feeds that were not yet verified by the competition jury. A result shown on a scoreboard at Queen Elizabeth Stadium on the night of a badminton final may have been adjusted after a protest was heard the next morning. The second vector is cached online results. The EAGOC web team uploaded results in near real time, but corrections issued after the upload were not always pushed to the same URL. A cached page from day six of competition shows a medal table that was superseded by the final edition.

The third vector is secondary databases that ingested the preliminary data and never updated it. Some sports statistics aggregators pulled the early feed and locked it as the permanent record. Ten years later, that stale data is still returned by search engines. To avoid the error, always verify against the final ratified result book. If the result book is not accessible, use a federation archive. The international federation for the sport in question sometimes holds a certified copy of the results from the 2009 East Asian Games, particularly for sports where world rankings were at stake. The failure mode is a doping case underreporting gap. The OCA announced some adverse findings months after the event, meaning the 2009 result book may not reflect the final medal reallocation. Note that uncertainty in your citation.

The official medal table for the 2009 East Asian Games uses a strict ranking convention. Delegations are ordered by gold medals first. Silver medals break a tie on gold, and bronze medals break a tie on silver. This is the OCA standard. A source that ranks by total medals is not wrong about the counts, but it is applying a different display rule. The confusion this creates is most visible for mid-table delegations where two or three NOCs are separated by a single gold medal.

Four delegations won over 90 percent of all medals at the 2009 Games. The official table still lists all nine, which implies a competitive balance that did not exist. When you cite the medal table, you are citing a document that reflects a political protocol as much as a sporting result. The nine participating National Olympic Committees are fixed in the historical record. China (CHN), Japan (JPN), South Korea (KOR), and Chinese Taipei (TPE) dominated the count. Hong Kong (HKG), Macau (MAC), Mongolia (MGL), Democratic People's Republic of Korea (PRK), and Guam (GUM) completed the field. No delegation can be added or removed, and the medal results as published in the result book are the permanent record. Subsequent doping disqualifications are a separate layer of history that your citation should note if relevant.

For source verification beyond the result book, go to the international federation that governed the sport in 2009. The competition format and rules were those of the relevant federation as at December 2009. A federation archive often holds a certified copy of the results from the East Asian Games, particularly for sports where the event carried world ranking points. This is your best check when the result book is not available.

The workflow is sport-specific. For aquatics, check the FINA (now World Aquatics) competition database. For athletics, World Athletics holds meet records. For badminton, the BWF tournament archive has match-level data. The gap is that not all federations treated the 2009 East Asian Games as a rankings event. Some sports, particularly those with truncated programmes compared to Asian Games standards, were not fully integrated into the federation's data systems. When you find a discrepancy between a federation archive and the result book, note both in your citation and flag the version conflict. The most common cause is a doping case underreporting gap. A federation may have updated its records after an adverse finding was announced months after the Games, while the printed result book could not be revised.

The Provisional-Tally Trap

The single failure that corrupts more citations than any other is trusting a medal table from a cached news article without checking the date. A story filed on 11 December 2009, two days before the closing ceremony, is a provisional count. It misses the final day of competition and any post-event result ratification.

Wrong Event, Wrong Venue

The second failure is confusing the East Asian Games with the East Asian Youth Games. The youth event did not exist in 2009. The confusion pair surfaces in databases that tag both series under a single "East Asian Games" label. The third failure is venue name conflation. Tseung Kwan O Sports Ground and Siu Sai Wan Sports Ground hosted athletics and football in different districts, but both are purpose-built sports grounds with similar names. Citing the wrong venue for a specific result undermines the rest of the citation.

When the Book Is Out of Reach

If you cannot access the result book, your fallback is a federation archive checked against at least one other independent source. A press tally alone is never enough. A cached web page is never enough. Use the date of access to signal to future researchers that your source may have been superseded after your retrieval date. The 22-sport programme is a closed set. The sports, disciplines, and events contested in 2009 cannot change retrospectively. What can change is your access to the correct edition of the numbers. Build your citation on the ratified record, note the version, and date everything.