Olympic Update

There are a few cracks beginning to show in that candy apple red veneer of what has generally been an exciting and compelling Beijing Games.

The most visible and talked-about controversy is the age, or lack thereof, of the Chinese women gymnasts who took the gold over the Americans in team competition.

Gymnasts must turn 16 in the year of the Olympics or world championships to be eligible for that competition, but records provided for lower-level events showed all three are 14.

U.S. Coach Bela Karolyi has been the most outspoken suggesting on at least two occasions that we saw live on-air, the Chinese were not playing by the rules.

Let’s go to the tale of the tape:

The Chinese gymnasts lack curves, have an average height of 4 feet 9 inches and weigh an average of 77 pounds. Deng is the smallest, at 4-6 and 68 pounds. The women on the United States team, generally more muscular and shapely than the Chinese, are an average of 3 ½ inches taller and 30 pounds heavier.


Yep, they look like they're ready for the junior prom.

Then again, as Matt Lauer suggested at the Opening Cermonies, the Chinese Olympic program mimics those of the old Eastern Bloc nations so one can never rule out forced malnourishment as a reason for general waifishness and underdevelopment.

Of course, the IOC isn’t touching this one with a ten-foot pole, accepting the sensitive-to-criticism host Chinese passports for the gymnasts as legit.

And gymnastics isn’t the only sport where there have been some irregularities in these Games as controversy has visited the boxing and shooting competitions with things breaking the way of the Chinese athlete.

The shooting controversy was of no interest to us but the boxing one grabbed us…

China's Gu Yu caused an upset by defeating Joe Murray, the bantamweight world bronze medalist, on Tuesday but afterwards his camp was adamant he had been on the receiving end of some questionable verdicts.

They implied that the home fighter had been favored.
"I knew what it was going to be like. I've been watching the scoring the past few days and I knew it was bad. So I was expecting it," Murray said.

"They were giving him points for anything but when I was hitting him they were not giving me points," he said.

British head coach Terry Edwards added: "I thought they were very generous to the Chinese lad. You expect a slight bias but you come to the Olympic Games and you also expect a level playing field."

The scoring rules in boxing were changed after the ’88 Olympics precisely to eliminate this sort of thing. It was in those Olympics that Roy Jones beat the stuffing out of his South Korean opponent only to lose on decision. The offending judges came right out and admitted to “feeling sorry” for the boxer of the host nation. The scoring methodology was changed so that individual punches landed were tallied and factored into the decision to, hopefully, eliminate subjectivity as much as possible.

Semi-related thought on these Olympics: We’ve watched the majority of the prime-time programming thus far and we’ve noticed a lack of “outside” or human interest stories on any of the Chinese athletes or of China and/or Beijing itself. No segments of Chris Collinsworth scooting around Beijing sampling the local fare, no stories, thus far, of any Chinese athlete who overcame a famine situation to become a female gymnast on the national team… woops… you get the point.

We’re about a week in and things have been going along smoothly but there have been a couple of eyebrow-raisers in these, the most tightly-controlled Games in our lifetime so we’ll stay tuned to see if the Chi-com grip tightens even further and if so, starts slipping, as those Southern rockers and wordsmiths .38 Special admonished, “Hold on loosely but don’t let go, ‘cause if you hold too tightly, you’re gonna lose control.”