Posted on 08/17/2008 10:11:47 AM PDT by AJKauf
Sorry I don’t watch girls gymnastics, but haven’t the Chinese essentially swept the events? That would seem to say that there is an advantage to the use of pre-pubescent girls.
But they shouldn’t be missing their premolars at age 16.
It’s a preponderance of evidence. All the stories with the different ages. The looks. The missing teeth. The size. They also seem to act a little more juvenile, like a bunch of little kids. I noticed it while watching them at the medal ceremony.
And unfortunately, the disposition of the Chinese to think the ends justifies the means. There have been more doping scandals among the Chinese recently than any other nation.
I was reading an interesting article last night. I remember the East Germans, who like the Chinese made winning a state affair. All those young women are now sick and dying from all the hormones they were given. After practise they would all line up, and their coaches would give them “vitamins” from, I think, the Stassi. Do you know where many of those coaches went? China hired a lot of them.
I’ll say something else, which is just supposition on my part. OK, so Chinese may be naturally smaller. But these girls supposedly get the best, taken from parents and fed on the state programs. So they should be taller and healthier, right?
So how come they look almost anorexic to me? You can see the bones of their skull. I remember reading a story about a young american gymnast obsessed with diet. I’ll bet anything these girls are undernourished to make them small and light. After all, they have no parents there. They have to eat what they are told.
I saw an article about a Chinese shooter who only got bronze. He was actually berated by the interviewer. He “disgraced his nation”. I have no doubt the coaches know what is expected of them. Gold. Period.
When she was in her mid-twenties she was a part of a Heavy Bombardment Wing staff (USAF) and when we would go out to dinner I would get some evil looks from people, especially women, and some comments about me dating a girl still in high school. We were married at that time.
Asian genetics seems to keep them, especially Asian females, looking very young for a longer time than western people.
That said, I do believe the Chinese are cheating as it is the way of every communist country.
They are so morally and structurally bankrupt that they have to derive acceptance and bragging rights from things such as sports. Just remember the Soviets in the Olympics. Their athletes were paid professionals devoted to nothing but their sport while we did just as well (most of the time) with our great athletes who were truly amateurs.
I do not watch any Olympics now because our professionals now dominate the teams in my favorite sports (hockey and basketball) and they even go and play in their old, home country teams too.
The Olympics are not even trying to hide the fact that most of the athletes are professionals.
“I’m 6 feet tall - slightly above average in the US”
At 6 feet you’re statistically somewhat tall for the U.S., where the average height is between 5’9 and 5’10.
And the age issue isn’t simply about looks. It began with documentation (noted in China) demonstrating that they are under age.
The age issue is not simply about bar performance. It’s also about understanding and dealing with the pressure, and it’s further about flexibility of bones and ligaments and tendency toward injury, balance (being built fairly straight), and the tendency for injury, which for gymnastics increases fairly rapidly even in the teenage years.
As for the pic of Shawn Johnson, she’s clearly still underdeveloped, as you would expect from someone her age, but simply looking at her on the screen rather than in a cherry-picked photo demonstrates she nevetherless DOES have curves, as the other girls competing most assuredly have developed or are developing.
“12 years ago, 15 year old American teens looked like 15 year olds. Now 12 year old American girls look like they are 17.
Our baseline of “teenager” has shifted. See Melinda’s post right above that you simply ignored to answer or address...”
What a completely ignorant comment. One woman’s granddaughter does not prove a “shift in baseline.” There are debates over whether a larger number of girls are entering puberty earlier in the past, but that’s vastly far away from a “shift in baseline.” If we’d had one, her daughter wouldn’t be MISTAKEN for a high-school senior, she’d be MISTAKEN for someone roughly her own age.
“Must be pretty rough getting your clock cleaned by a kid in training undies.”
Great...
“Sorry I don’t watch girls gymnastics, but haven’t the Chinese essentially swept the events? That would seem to say that there is an advantage to the use of pre-pubescent girls”
women’s competition - China wins gold.
Our girls outclass china on all events except bars (except for this night - Alica Sacramone fall on her beam mount - but one chinese gymnast also falls. Alicia falls again on floor - but china also puts up a ridiculously sloppy routine from a pre-pubescent)
China broke away with over a full point lead on bars. This is when they put up 3 underage girls against true 16 year olds and a 19 yr.old.
Bars is where it pays to be a prepubescent. Swinging is easier - they don’t have to hold their feet up while swinging under the low bar, and they don’t have to break their bodyline in between the bars.
Men’s team competition - china wins gold. No controversy.
Men’s all-around competition - china wins gold. No controvery.
Women’s all-around - americans take gold and silver despite obviously skewed scoring against the americans.
The gymnasts are in diapers. The soldiers under the stands are in diapers. Are all the Chinese in diapers?
Olympics Opening: Soldiers wore nappies for seven-hour stint at Olympic opening
“The whole purpose of my post was, to say, either file a protest are stop whining. “
Then your post was bizarre. None of us has the ability to “file a protest” that actually matters beyond commenting about it on a message board.
Yet here, another woman's insistance that the Chinese gymnasts look underage is without question...
Look, if there's other data then by all means use it! Using looks alone simply doesn't cut it. Look at the other posts in her about coworkers, wives, travelers. Asians just look younger than what we expect.
Yes, but when I think “curves” I think curves like most young girls I know. Our girls did have more curves than the Chinese. Some of ours did not appear to be very developed but were still bigger than the Chinese. The Chinese girls looked like babies, especially in the face, compared to ours.
I think most gymnasts are slightly underdeveloped. I did gymnastics, stunts and tumbling, and ran track in high school and the stress of exercise and competition caused me to be a very late bloomer. I looked 12 when I was 16. I don’t think I even went through puberty until I was 16 or 17. I was only 4’11” and 90lbs when I was 15 but when I quit gymnastics at 16 I shot up to 5’6” and 120lbs.
Now here is another interesting article I found.
“I’ll say something else, which is just supposition on my part. OK, so Chinese may be naturally smaller. But these girls supposedly get the best, taken from parents and fed on the state programs. So they should be taller and healthier, right?”
Not necessarily. What you have in China is over 1 Billion people, with a state apparatus designed to find “oddballs” to fit into a range of sports niches. If they need to find peculiarly small girls for “womens” gymnastics, considering that these 1 Billion run small anyway, they just naturally have a much larger selection within that class of physique that will have the appropriate talents than does the US.
I don’t disagree that they could be cheating on this matter, its just that the size differentials are not dispositive.
And for that matter there are cultural differences/training that go into affect/behavior. I come from Asia myself, and it was a bit disconcerting to find US teenage girls appearing to be 25 years old, not just in size but in presence.
“I think most gymnasts are slightly underdeveloped. I did gymnastics, stunts and tumbling, and ran track in high school and the stress of exercise and competition caused me to be a very late bloomer.”
me too - and I was a subject in study done about the female athlete triad.
My teammates and I all experienced delay in onset of puberty and slower growth, but the exercise did not “stop” growth all together.
We still grew some curves - just not as much.
We still grew breasts - just not size d’s.
When one coach quit and our weekly training hours decreased, we all experience a growth curve at the same time.
Our girls will grow more when they quit the sport. They will go up a cup size or two and their hips will get bigger, but they still look like teenagers right now.
None of it really matters now. I don’t believe it’s “grasping” for a country to invest government resources into winning the Olympics, the games are clearly a cog in the machine of “soft power” - something Americans seem to have developed either amnesia or disdain over. At this point it’s less about winning the games than about losing them specifically to China, which is one of the “ultimate goals” the Chinese government wanted. It is, as an article several weeks ago noted, Chinas first chance to “defeat” us on the world stage in some way, in front of the entire world. There’s a reason they sunk so much into this, it’s not like the old Soviet Union or eastern bloc countries, this is about China demonstrating its power and dominance, saying “this is just the beginning.”
We know that’s why these games were given to China, we knew that’s what they wanted. Many ordinary Chinese, even those unhappy with their government, have commented that these games are one of the most important events in China’s history.
And we simply sat by and gave it to them. I particularly loved the shooter yesterday who once again was in the lead and once again only had to perform without a mistake, not great, just don’t screw up. Instead, for the second straight games, he screwed up, costing us not only a gold we thought we had, but costing us a medal toward the overall tally, and ALSO giving the Chinese yet another gold. Down the line we have fallen short or just plain flopped.
The medal race is over, we may win the overall count, but that’s not what counts, and we can’t touch China in the golds now. There are predictions they may push nearly 50 golds, while we’ll be lucky to see 30. That makes all of the projections before the games of a China win look bizarrely conservative. It’s going to be an utter blowout, and it will be used as symbolism for China’s blowing us out of the water in every other respect in the near future.
I’m blown away that we didn’t even try to counter this. Even the Canadians are investing over $100 million for the next Olympic games beyond their normal investment. Again, if it didn’t mean something, why does everyone else try so hard? If it didn’t mean something, why do we scrap to raise $150 million privately to fund our own athletes? If it didn’t mean something, why are any of us talking about Chinese underage athletes? Or skewed judging? If we’re going to get absolutely rolled the first time a new competitor really brings their ‘A’ game, why are our athletes even bothering? (If the EU ever competed as a single entity, we’d have been rolled long ago.)
Either we care or we don’t. If we do care, it would not take a great deal of additional funding to remove some of the roadblocks we have in place for funneling our best athletes through our massive already-existing athletics programs. But if we keep blocking athletes out due to funding issues, if we keep having to rely on people for four years who time and again are injured or otherwise withdraw at the last moment leaving us scrambling, then we’re just going to become a laughingstock. We may win a lot of medals, but we don’t win them commensurate with our size, our sporting history and the amount of money we spend on sports in general.
There's something different about the pre-pubescent pubic area and a grown woman ... grown meaning, even 16 or 17 year olds have a hip/groin/pubic area that indicates the developement for being a mother .. giving birth.
Two of the Chinese girls are (again, only an opinion .. ) not yet developed and seem to be closer to 12 and 13 than the required 16.
Really .. I'm not a freak ... I've just noticed.
“Yet here, another woman’s insistance that the Chinese gymnasts look underage is without question...”
Why do you insist on confusing an underage who looks older with an entire team of girls who claim to be older but look much younger?
One woman’s daughter on a message board versus an entire team of girls whose age is not questioned just here but virtually EVERYWHERE, backed up by documentation that ALSO demonstrates these girls are not of age. You can keep pretending it’s a bunch of clueless westerners who just don’t know how small Asians are (because they’re all so tiny, right?), or you can pay attention to the entirety of the issue.
“S-l-o-w”
Maybe if you put a tiny bit more effort into basic writing you’d get your point across a little more clearly.
Let me add a personal perspective from Asia -
American teenage girls do look much older - and act older, in a social sense - than their equivalents in Asia. I don’t know how this can be documented, but thats what I saw.
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