POLL: Chinese Women’s Olympic Gymnastics Team, Are They Way Under Age?
Aug 12th, 2008 | By RealityTV | Category: Olympic Headlines, Opinion | 2,039 views |
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When watching the Chinese women’s gymnastic team perform, one is immediately stricken by the apparent illegal age of the performers. There are clear age requirements for the Olympics, but why is it that only the Chinese team seems to be an average age of 12?
Deng Linlin of China is alleged by the Chinese team to be 16 years of age. We are not sure, but we think they are defining a year as the length of time it takes Venus to orbit the Sun, not Earth. This girl looks 12 at the very most. She has no physical signs of female development, zero body fat and looks like, if 16, she would be being treated as an anorexic.
Deng looks to be, at most, 60 pounds, and has about a 4′ frame. She couldn’t get on the E-Rides at Disneyworld! And she would definitely qualify for the discount children’s ticket without any questions from the park’s operators!
There are clear advantages to playing this card for a women’s gymnastics team. Weight is more evenly distributed in the young. In addition, the younger a girl starts in the Olympics, the more experience she can garner for future competitions. Basic physics also tells you, the smaller the frame, the less room it takes to execute a move. A 4 footer can somersault in significantly less distance than someone 5 feet, vastly reducing the probability of stepping out of bounds during floor exercises, a common problem in gymnastics for girls of legitimate age and stature.
Most of all, sneaking in underage girls opens up the field for a broader array of talent, providing the teams that cheat a significant advantage. There are many candidates that were excluded by legitimate teams in the competition, sometimes just months shy of the qualification age.
The New York Times has already reported that online records have two members of the Chinese women’s team, He Kexin and Jiang Yuyuan, at age 14, in violation of the Olympic minimum age requirement of 16. Yang Yilin was indicated as being 14 on a state-run television website at about the same time.
14 seems generous. Apparently, someone confirmed the ages of these girls, but common sense says they are most likely lying.
International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge deferred responsibility for enforcing the age limit to China’s gymnastics federation, but isn’t that like letting the fox watch the hen house?
Bela Karolyi, the former coach of Olympic gold medalists Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton said “Shame on the IOC if they don’t do anything about it.”
Karolyi’s solution? “The only way to stop this is to take off the age limit. Take it away. We would have some amazing young athletes on our team, too, but they missed it by a few months. To force honest countries to hold back and allow other countries, not so honest, to push them forward, it’s not fair.”
“No so honest” was kind.
We have a related follow up story on this one over at: Communism Does Not Upset us, Chinese Cheats Do! How NASDAQ Assists China As They Cheat the US in Olympics and In Business
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August 26th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Hi lili…
Good to have you on board. Welcome.
It is all about the criminal activities of the Chinese Government and Chinese Businesses. The Olympics are only the tip of the iceberg.
Some of our other articles get into this. Free Trade with China, in our humble opinion, has made China rich at America’s expense.
And as long as criminal activities are evident and damaging to the US, we should take actions to protect ourselves from those activities.
But we digress a bit. Solving one problem at a time, China proved in its own Olympics, that something as simple as obeying the rules was impossible for them. They instead resorted to forgery and other criminal acts. They abused children to lie about their age. And they attempted to cover up their crimes.
Usually, as we have said before, one cockroach scurries out of the cabinet, you can bet there are thousands in the crevices. We believe China (the government) is cheating the entire world any way they can.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
The N. Korean girls suffer too, but N. Korea is unable to cheat because they were already punished for underage cheating by the FIG. Then Kim Gwan Suk one of the best bar workers ever seemed to disappear from the face of the earth. Why is swift and harsh punishment handed out to N. Korea and not China? Because China is a rich country and #1 in foreign reserves with plenty of bribe money and kickbacks for the IOC and FIG, while N. Korea had people literally dying of famine?
“Why do so many ppl here have such negative view against the Chinese government? Does it hurt to watch a country rise so fast?” Yes, it’s “great” to see China become so rich so fast based on the simple formula of utilizing slave labor to undersell the countries that had much higher quality manufacturing (Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, US, Germany etc). It’s “impressive” how they can control 1.3 billion people with domestic spying, secret police, torture and labor camps. Don’t worry about due process because they arrest and torture the lawyers too. Lovely. The Nazis saved Germany from a hyperinflationary depression, I guess we should admire them too.
August 16th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
We would like to add that we humbly disagree with the people in our polls. We feel that the team members of the Chinese Women’s Gymnastics team are victims of a totalitarian government that has placed pressure on them to lie and win at all costs.
We feel that the media and the world will know the truth within months and China will be disgraced. But these girls deserve our respect for surviving in an environment where a government rules by intimidation and lies.
Our hearts go out to them, and we wish them our best and hope they are back again to show us their best in the next Olympics. We hope China does not get excluded for their illegal acts, because these girls deserved better.
August 16th, 2008 at 2:05 am
I bumped into this link via search engine and found it really intriguing. I just wanted to say that in a HUGE population of 13 billion people (about there?) it’s really really sad that China can’t even come up with a legitimate team that can ensure the gold for them. By putting these really young girls on the team just makes them look weak.
And this Olympics event was a great chance for the Chinese people to show off their stuff, but if the entire competition is marred by controversy and scandal, what’s the point? If you can’t win legally, then you might as well not win at all because…well, maybe it’s just me, but don’t the govt officials find the repeating underage accusations annoying? And maybe because some people value morals and respect rules. The rules aren’t there to sabotage anyone. Everyone’s on an even playing field.
Lastly, I know a lot of people that say that Chinese people look young. And they do, that I’ll admit. But there’s a limit, and it’s really rare that such a great number of people think so. There’s my two cents.
August 15th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Hi Linda…
There will always be those that disagree in a free nation.
To be honest, most of your questions were already answered in this and other articles on the site, and others appeared to be rhetorical.
Like “..why can’t we just be happy for them”? Maybe we should be happy for the girls 15 years and 10 months that were excluded from the Olympics while 12-14 year olds from China were allowed in. Those girls may never get to complete in the Olympics because by the time they do qualify, they will be nearly 20.
“What is the Point of Commenting on This?” Uh, because we find cheating abhorrent and think the issue important. If you don’t why are you here?
“Whoever wrote this article has a totally negative view against China.” Not a question, but we will comment. That is nonsense. This had nothing specifically to do with China.
“What will be the result?” Hopefully others that concur with us like Olympic Coach Bela Karolyi will pressure the IOC to drop the rule so all teams have a level playing field. That is what we consider the best solution. Welcome all the Chinese, but welcome all the Russians, Americans, Japanese, etc. as well.
This is not a hate article at all and it is not an article specifically about China. If the USA sent in a number of girls that were of questionable age, we would have written about that as well. But it was China that chose to cheat. This is an article about fairness in the Olympics, the rules, and equal enforcement of those rules.
You do not tell one athlete that they can take a banned substance and another that they cannot. Why? It wouldn’t be fair. This is absolutely no different.
August 15th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Thanks realitytv. Sorry I did not appreciate this article. I think enough discussion on this and I am disappointed that you did not comment on most of my questions above but only focus on UNDER AGE, UNDER AGE,CHINESE WEBSITE SAID, AGAIN UNDER AGE, CHEATED, UNDER AGE……
Congratulations to Liukin and Shawn!!! I respect whoever put on good show for the Olympics and I am happy for them regardless of nationality and race.
August 15th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Hello Again Linda. Thank you for responding. We love it when people “kick things up”.
In actuality, there are no 16 year old Chinese women that look 11. Looking younger is a life long advantage of Asian women. It is not something that delays puberty for 5 years.
Again, please read the article. We are only reporting the facts already discovered by the New York Times and endorsed by Olympics coaches.
Last night, China admitted their own web site had one of their gymnasts listed at age 13. They quickly deleted her records and claimed it must be a mistake. So, they expect us to believe that of the hundreds of millions of women’s ages they list, the one mistake was on a compeititor in the Olympics that had to be 16 to compete? Please. Coincidence like that doesn’t just defy statistics, it defies logic.
Look at Deng Linlin’s pictures again. These are from THESE olympics. There is no 16 year old in the world that looks like that. Chinese, Dutch, Japanese, French or Russian. China cheated.