In the context of real life, those people are not a tenth the victim that she is.
No, but I have.
No, you punish the adults who exploited her and you leave the kid alone. Stripping her of the medals is shaming and vindictive and childish and mean.
I never said they had an unfair advantage. I said they have a potential advantage, and the rule was put into place to remove temptation.
Regardless, it matters none. The rule is in place, and any other country that might have had a 13yo athlete who could have competed for gold was royally screwed.
But you haven’t. They might have some advantages, but you haven’t explained why those advantages are unfair. Is it unfair for Yao Ming to be taller than everybody else?
“Real life” doesn’t hand out gold metals. The IOC does, and their rules are the ones in question.
Chinese human rights violations can be addressed elsewhere.
Yes, I really have:
She gets to compete before injuries have had much of a chance to slow her down, unlike her competitors. She gets to train harder at a younger age than her competitors, who have to make sure their wheels don’t fall off before they’re eligible for the Games. She gets to compete at 14 and her competitors do not – a relevant fact since it would seem that younger tends to be better in women’s gymnastics.
If his height was the result of some kind of exploitation, then it would be outlawed. Age isn’t inherently unfair, but people do bad things to use it to their advantage. Steroids aren’t inherently unfair since everyone has equal access to them. They are outlawed to protect the athletes.
What practice being the size they were several years ago when they were below the allowable age?
You can say all the same things about being younger in any other sport. What’s unfair about in gymnastics that isn’t unfair in basketball?
SI.com on the advantages of being smaller:
*SI.com: What effect has age restriction had on international competition?
Swift: It has had an impact. Nadia Comaneci was 14 when she won in Montreal in 1976. Four years later, she did well. She won a couple of medals but did not win the all-around medal and she was not the dominant gymnast she was as a 14 year old. So there is a physical advantage to being smaller, more flexible and quicker. We see this in figure skating, which has the same rule. The hips, when they have not developed, spin quicker. That enables the competitors to do more complicated routines. In gymnastics, it’s flips. If you are smaller, you can flip more. Some people also think the younger athlete does not feel as much pressure, so it has an advantage in that respect, too.*
from this piece
Right, so you punish the exploiters, not the victims.
Right again, but the athletes have a choice about the steroids. Nobody’s forcing them. This He kid is being forced.
And tall guys can reach the basket easier. So what?
It is unfair precisely because no other underage gymnasts were allowed to compete.
You seem to be arguing that the Chinese team had an unfair advantage due to ignoring the rules that other teams were held back by, but that the individual gymnasts did not have an unfair advantage.
This argument is, to put it bluntly, too silly to even argue against.
But that’s not an inherent unfairness of youth over age, just rule breakers over non-rule breakers.
Yep. That’s pretty much it.
If being underage was an advantage in basketball (which it isn’t), then getting to play by pretending to be older would be unfair. Such a player would benefit from the rule (by not having to compete against underage players) without being subject the rule himself. I’m stupefied by your contention that this situation is not unfair.
“underage” is an arbitrary word defined only by the rules of a sport. Youth is an advantage in any sport. A 24 year old basketball player has distinct advantages over a 39 year old basketball player. Is that unfair?
None of this stuff matters. A sport has a rule. A competitor is caught violating that rule. It makes no difference whether the violation is deliberate, coerced, or even inadvertant. The competitor is disqualified. That’s sports.
Ed
To fix your analogy, what if the NBA had a rule that said no player could be taller than 6’8", but one team decided to break that rule by playing several taller players and somehow managed to get away with it.
If the players on that team went on to win a championship, did they not do so in part through an unfair advantage? Sticking to individual accomplishments, if Yao Ming (7’6") is 1st Team All-NBA at Center in this hypothetical, did he not have an unfair advantage, having benefited from the rule that he himself ignored by not being compared to taller Centers?
If the rules say that the minimum age is 26, then yes! The fact that the arbitrary definition is codified in the rules, and that the restriction is apparently being acknowledged by all but one competitor, is what makes it unfair. Obviously.
For those who are saying that you “shouldn’t punish the victim” because the government forced her to lie, would you say the same thing if she was doping? For example, if the Chinese government forced/coerced their sprinters into using steroids, should we not strip their medals just because they were forced into it by their government?
Also, I’ve read numerous articles that say that the age limit is not just for the protection of young athletes, but also but also because young gymnasts are at an advantage. Younger, lighter female gymnasts have a better power-to-weight ratio and a center of gravity that’s more conducive to acrobatics. Once they get into puberty, they don’t just gain height and weight (which are disadvantages), but the location of body weight changes and affects their centre of gravity, making it harder to flip and rotate quickly. Also, younger gymnasts might have a mental advantage in that they tend to be more fearless when it comes to the big tricks.
Cite from the Australian Institute of Sport: