Give me a fucking break. If these girls are sixteen I will bend down and kiss my own ass. It looks like a few of them could be as young as twelve. Do they really expect us to believe this?
Now, if the IOC lifts the age restriction, I have no problem at all with it. I was really beginning to respect China until this farce.
I haven’t been watching the Olympics so I haven’t seen the athletes in question… but I’ve always understood that gymnasts of that caliber keep such a low body-fat percentage that they don’t go through puberty. Makes 'em look younger than they really are.
Not that I’d be surprised if China* was * lying about their ages.
I would peg one of those girls at being no older than 13, and another, maybe fifteen. On a good day. It’s their facial structures, and total complete lack of anything like hips or breasts. The older ones at least have a hint of curve going on. It’s subtle, but it’s there.
Somebody is totally lying about their ages. They’re very good, and that’s why, but that doesn’t make it acceptable.
No offense, but is it true that there is an Olympic event, women’s gymnastics, in which the older (but hardly old, or even adult) and more experienced and stronger and more thoroughly-trained competitors are at a disadvantage compared to twelve-year-old girls? I beg your pardon, but doesn’t this put womens’ gymnastics on a par with, say, “fitting into a box?” where past a certain minimum level of flexibility, smallness is the only value?
I mean, rules are rules, but few competitions protect the theoretically-best-in-the-world participants from embarrassment by barring small children from competing. The Tour-de-France has no rules regarding training wheels, does it?
The intent of the rule was to prevent overtraining and, well, brutalization of children, something that resulted from the sport’s evolution from one of gracefulness to one of athleticism. The same thing happened in figure skating, too. Preteen girls are “best in the world” because the standards have evolved to make them that way. A few decades ago, the “best” gymnasts were in their twenties, but they didn’t do the same things, either.
By preventing competition until a later age, the hope seems to have been that the nature of the sport could retreat from one that created an image of child abuse, with an overtone of kiddie porn. If enforced, it still could accomplish that.
If you did, you’d be looking at five to twenty.
By coincidence, those looking at that range are precisely the ones who’d be interested in thirteen year olds.
Oh for God’s sake.
Fine. I would estimate that these girls are too young.
I just bet you would, you dirty old man.
They bar horses from competing in races and such until a certain age (IMHO still too young) for much the same reasons.
Bela Karolyi agrees with you.
The NBC broadcasters have been spending the entire broadcast of the Chinese women’s gymnastic team on how young they look and suspicions about falsifying ages. Christ, those girls look young.
Just compare the girls from the US and China. Yes they are all tiny or petite but the sixteen year old girls actually look like like they are sixteen from the US. I’m not sure why this pisses me off but it does.
There is no way that some of those girls are sixteen from China. Stop Cheating China.
Holy crap! According to this site:
Get it straight. She’s a dirty old woman!
Lingling Deng? Are you kidding me? Thirteen at most, but she looks twelve to me. It’s not the very low bodyfat percentage, it’s their faces. They are the faces of little girls. Very young girls.
One more time: I’m ignorant and I want to know and I don’t wish to insult anybody.
Young horses can run five-eighths of a mile faster than two-year-olds? And they’re barred from races to prevent them from winning and being hurt in the process? And this is done so that older and more resilient but often slower horses can win, and to protect the breed from losing a generation or two in the pursuit of short-term profit? I’m happy to take your word for all that. But (and I’m sorry for my stupidity) what does any of it have to do with amateur womens’ gymnastics?
And I’m not old either!
well, I don’t own a tv, am only glancing at the olympics at work, was oblivious to all this controversy, just saw a chinese girl fall, and thought, she’s too young
I have to question the legitimacy of any sport where a 12 year old can compete at the same level as a 20 year old. I know that there is no precise definition of a sport, but someone that isn’t physically developed shouldn’t be as good as someone that is in any sport.