“Hello world, we won gold medals and we’re not even in middle school!”
Anyone watching women gymnastics last night probably uttered these same three thoughts:
- How do they do that?
- I don’t understand the scoring
- The Chinese girls look like 10 year olds
I know it’s all speculation, but sometimes you have to call a skunk a skunk, and something stinks. To pour more fuel on this controversy fire, Martha Karolyi, the team coordinator of the U.S. women’s team, keeps on sharing her theories to the general public. Most recently, she noticed a tooth missing on one of the Chinese gymnast, and made the assumption that her adult tooth has yet to come in. Is that too farfetched?
Last night, as my wife and I watched the U.S. women’s team stumble and the Chinese women’s team capitalize on those miscues; I couldn’t help my wife get visibly distraught. Her observations paralleled Karolyi’s.
- “They look 10 years old.”
- “No way they hit puberty yet.”
- “There’s no curves, no sign of teen-hood.”
- “Jaden [our three-year-old son] looks more developed than some of these girls.”
The last one might be a stretch, but after finding out some of the heights and weights of these Chinese girls, it’s a close stretch. One girl is 4 foot 6 and weighs in at 68 pounds. Jaden is 3 foot 4 and weighs in at 40 pounds.
According to this NY Times article, the average height and weight of the Chinese women gymnasts are 4 foot 9 and 77 pounds. If China is not falsifying the age, then at the very least we have to look into malnourishment and health issues. This story is not dying down any time soon, especially with China getting a bad rap about the Milli Vanilli lip-synching and the refusal to discuss the current political atmosphere in China.
We almost tricked the world.
At the very least, the Olympics bring us this phenomenon.
I may drink water, but I eat gold.
Jaden is actually 45 lbs. @ 3′ 4″.
Hey Won! Brett McCracken here. I found your blog via gmail status message…
I’ve been writing about the underage Chinese gymnasts myself (and I have no doubt several of them are no older than 13). The best twist that I’ve heard in this whole saga is that one of the girl’s supposedly authentic passports has her birthday as Jan 1, 1992… which makes her eligible for this year’s Olympics by ONE day! Born a day earlier and she’d not be able to compete. How convenient!