Now that China has been widely applauded for pulling off a successful Olympic Games, the less-than-genuine performances at the opening ceremonies are becoming a distant memory. An even more distant memory, dredged up and making the rounds today in the Australian press, may drive any lingering embarrassment still further into the shadows.

It seems Lin Miaoke, the adorable 9-year-old who perhaps unknowingly lip-synched “Ode to the Motherland” more than two weeks ago, is not alone in the pantheon of “great Olympic musical deceptions of our time,” as The Age termed it. An entire orchestra, in fact, got there eight years ago, we now learn. The Sydney Morning-Herald revealed the secret: “Sydney Olympics faked it too.”

Not only was the Sydney Symphony just going through the motions of a live performance while speakers pumped out recorded versions of its musical selections, some of the recordings were recorded by another group altogether, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. After an unconfirmed report ran over the weekend in The Age, an official spoke to the Herald today:

“It [the performance] was all pre-recorded, and the M.S.O. did record a minority of the music that was performed,” the Sydney Symphony’s managing director, Libby Christie, said yesterday. “It’s correct that we were basically miming to a pre-recording.”

Indeed, prerecorded music accompanied a section of the four-and-a-half-hour ceremony titled “Tin Symphony,” which was something of an “Ode to the Motherland,” the song mouthed by Ms. Miaoke in Beijing.

Both countries defended the sacrifice of authenticity to avoid putting the nation’s image at risk, and considered the trade-off a no-brainer. “There are millions of people watching, and if something goes wrong, you’d be snookered,” Trevor Green of the Melbourne orchestra told the Morning Herald. An unnamed source reiterated the point in an interview with The Age: “You simply can’t embarrass yourself on the world stage — you must do whatever you can to make it perfect.”

The explanation offered by Chen Qigang, general music designer of the most recent opening ceremonies, was quite similar. From The New York Times:

“Everyone should understand this in this way,” Mr. Chen said. “This is in the national interest. It is the image of our national music, national culture, especially during the entrance of our national flag. This is an extremely important, extremely serious matter.”

Recorded music has figured in many prominent “live” appearances outside the Olympics as well. Milli Vanilli and Britney Spears may be responsible for the most infamous performances, but those pop stars were preceded by one of the most celebrated voices in history: Luciano Pavarotti committed the musical felony at a 1992 concert in Modena, Italy.

Earlier this year, another offense was added posthumously to his rap sheet. At the Winter Olympics in Turin in 2006, Pavarotti mimed to a song he had recorded several days beforehand in a studio. Leone Magiera, the conductor who confirmed that incident, offered a defense that has become familiar enough by now: With Pavarotti’s health in decline, he said, it was “too dangerous for him … to risk a live performance before a global audience.”