A decade ago there was an article based on DNA testing the US used to determine the age of Dominican baseball players and to see if they lied about their age.
Is a DNA test really accurate enough to tell the difference between a 15 year old, and an 18 year old? The teen-adult difference matters a lot in sports.
Well, out of the two options for the tests, they do not seem to be Shinola.
That is just one type of DNA testing. I doubt something that unreliable would be used to determine whether an athlete gets banned or not.
It wouldn’t be the first time that officials fell for pseudo-scientific nonsense. Here is a study from last year about a new method–that is accurate to +/- 4 years. So still not Shinola.
It seems to me that a lent birth certificate would show the wrong parents so the claim would have to be that the child was adopted (or something similar) in which case a parental match would not be expected.
You might be confused with Horvath’s Epigenetic clock, which can predict how long you’ve got to live with remarkable accuracy (r = 0.96):
Well there’s another answer if it’s just the father that doesn’t match the birth certificate. One in 25 fathers is not biological parent - study It’s older as a cite. The story referenced study looked at studies where 1-30% of fathers listed on birth certificates aren’t the biological father.
If they can at least show the DNA matches the mother on the birth certificate that’s a strong argument for a valid birthdate on the certificate. I’d hope any sports governing agency testing DNA would look at the consequences of how they manage the data with respect to claimed biological fathers.