China Busted Using Underage Gymnasts

@ehBeth,

I didn't think he was comparing her to Chinese athletes.

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@gungasnake,

gungasnake wrote:

I'll say again, there appears to be a bigger story here than China using underage gymnists. The two top routines in uneven bars was not close; Liukin's routine was clearly better. Some body thought it was close enough to steal and it wasn't, unless you weren't watching. There is probably a case of one or more judges being bribed or something like that here.

Not just the uneven bars. While Nastia ended up with all around gold, there was questionable judging in the all-around for both uneven bars and vault.

I remember Nastia did a near perfect vault and got a low execution score, and then the Chinese girl "crashed and burned" (to put it mildly) and got a near perfect execution score.

1 Reply

@gungasnake,

There is no debate among the experts, youth is an advantage in gymnastics. The problem is that pushing young bodies so hard is bad for the bodies over the long term, which is why they need to be 16 years old in order to be allowed to compete. Critics say that the rule is unfair to those who follow it because there is no way to enforce the rule under current IOC structure, ans the IOC is not willing to change in such a way that it would become the enforcer.

This is yet another example of why for me the Olympics have become too corrupt to be interesting.

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@roger,

Thanks Roger.
IMO, looking at bodies is a waste of time. Very few of the gymnasts have womanly bodies. It's the face. Shawn Johnson has the facial structure of a sixteen year old. Your Chinese gymnast simply didn't. She looked like a little girl wearing makeup. It was so apparent.

1 Reply

@oralloy,

oralloy wrote:

gungasnake wrote:
I'll say again, there appears to be a bigger story here than China using underage gymnists. The two top routines in uneven bars was not close; Liukin's routine was clearly better. Some body thought it was close enough to steal and it wasn't, unless you weren't watching. There is probably a case of one or more judges being bribed or something like that here.

Not just the uneven bars. While Nastia ended up with all around gold, there was questionable judging in the all-around for both uneven bars and vault.

I remember Nastia did a near perfect vault and got a low execution score, and then the Chinese girl "crashed and burned" (to put it mildly) and got a near perfect execution score.

Got my wires crossed slightly. There were scoring discrepancies in the all-around like I remembered, but the "crash and burn" I remember was the vault finals.

Here is what passes for a stuck landing for a Chinese athlete:

http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2008/08/20/PH2008082003943.jpg

1 Reply

@oralloy,

This was one of the poorest Olympics that I can remember. Very few gymnasts actually stuck their landings. Shawn Johnson didn't stick hers. Nastia did but her routine was not rated as difficult. I actually believe that she should have snared the gold.

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@eoe,

Quote:

BEIJING (AFP) - Two elderly Chinese women who applied to demonstrate at official Olympic protest zones have been ordered to serve one year each of reeducation through labour, a close relative said Wednesday.

In the latest signal that China's leaders will tolerate no dissent during the Games, Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, were interrogated for 10 hours and sentenced to one year of "Reeducaton Through Labour," said Wu's son Li Xuehui.

. . . .

The two old women, forcibly evicted from their Beijing homes in 2001, had applied five times for permits to protest during the Games, according to Li.

. . . .

Last month China's government said it would set up three protest zones for use by demonstrators during the August 8-24 Games, but Beijing police have said that not a single protest had been formally approved.

The vast bulk of the 77 applications were withdrawn because the relevant authorities had addressed the problems through "consultations", police said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080820/wl_asia_afp/oly2008chinarightsprotest

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@eoe,

I agree with that--they're so muscular and have so little body fat that it kind of makes "curves" out of the question except for a few of them... The thing that really made me sure some of the Chinese girls were too young was the hair and face glitter-- several of them were just caked with it! Laughing

It was such a little-girl-getting-to-play-with-makeup thing.

1 Reply

@cyphercat,

Somebody needs to send the IOC a letter, sort of like:

Dear Sirs,

You probably will not enjoy reading this, but there is reason to believe that the peasants of XX province have promulgated a nefarious fraud upon the government of China, and that the gymnist Ho-Kacheen from that province is actually a panda bear and not a 12-year-old girl as the Chinese government was led to believe....

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@eoe,

I think that the moves are getting more and more complex and difficult to work the new scoring structure. One score remains about execution (which includes sticking the landings and hitting the required 'elements'), but the other score is all about difficulty. These gymnasts are no much more focused on difficulty than ever before and are losing some of the perfection in execution because of it.

1 Reply

@littlek,

Apparently if anybody was interested in the welfare of the athletes, nobody would be allowed to START gymnastics until they were 11 or 12, much less compete in Olympic events. If nothing else the constant pounding on joints at early ages locks their bodies into a certain size which they cannot grow past regardless of genetics.

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@oralloy,

But the Olimpic Committee have verified the Gymnasts formally who all are adult and qualified . That's truth . We can't just believe western media.

1 Reply

@May-G,

It's not just Western media; this one got blown apart by the bloggers and pajamaheddin. The IOC is either lying or they're totally incompetent.

0 Replies

China Busted Using Underage Gymnasts

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