Looking for underage gymnasts waste of time?

THEY'RE looking under the balance beam, asking questions around the uneven bars. International gymnastic investigators won't rest until they finally know for sure whether China has been using underage gymnasts to win Olympic medals. Expect a full and thorough report by the 2012 Olympics in London, where the Chinese will be favored once again. By that time, the 10-year-olds now in training will be 16 and ready to win some golds of their own. Indeed, little girls seem to grow up quickly these days, especially if they're Chinese gymnasts. One day it seems like they're just 14, the next day their passports show they're 16. It can get awfully confusing, even for the girls themselves. One of them, Yang Yun, said she misspoke in an interview last year when she said she was 14 when she won two bronze medals in the Sydney Games. Teammate Dong Fangxiao, meanwhile, refused to discuss the other day why her blog listed her as being born in the Year of the Ox in the Chinese zodiac, which would have made her 15 in Sydney. "I've left the gymnastics team," Dong told The Associated Press. The latest revelations have prompted the International Gymnastics Federation to expand its probe of underage Chinese in the Beijing Games to include members of the 2000 team in Sydney. The plan is now to go to the Chinese and ask for more birth certificates, passports, and ID cards to sort things out. Who knows, they might even get a chance to talk to the gymnasts themselves, if they aren't too busy training. But at some point they'll finally be forced to announce the obvious: If the Chinese government says their gymnasts were 16, then they were 16. Case closed. There won't be any medals returned, or any suspensions announced. No one will be punished for breaking the rules. Yes, the circumstantial evidence might seem to suggest that the Chinese entered gymnasts who weren't the minimum age. Registration lists posted previously on the Web site of the General Administration of Sport of China showed that both He Kexin and Yang Yilin were too young to compete in Beijing, and their birth dates were later changed. The Chinese will tell you that Asian gymnasts are normally smaller anyway, but as someone who stood next to the Chinese gymnasts in Beijing I can tell you that most rational people wouldn't believe some of them were 16. There are, however, no scientific tests that can tell age with any great accuracy. So any real proof would have to come from official government documents. And the official government documents will say they are 16. Olympic officials aren't about to embarrass the Chinese, who just spent untold billions to host an extravaganza on their behalf. Accusing them of doctoring documents just wouldn't seem right after they went out of their way to put on the party to end all parties in Beijing. Besides, it's not like they're the only ones cheating. Romania admitted in 2002 that several gymnasts' ages had been falsified, including Olympic medalists Gina Gogean and Alexandra Marinescu. And North Korea was banned from the 1993 world championships after FIG officials noticed that uneven bars gold medalist Kim Gwang Suk was listed as being 15 three years in a row. Young gymnasts are prized because they're more flexible and usually more fearless than those who have more experience. Nadia Comaneci was only 14 when she helped spark widespread interest in gymnastics by getting a perfect 10 and winning the gold in Montreal in 1976. The minimum age to compete in elite gymnastics was raised from 14 to 15 in the 1980s, then to 16 in 1997, driven by fears that young girls were being pushed too hard and could be seriously injured. At the time it seemed like the right thing to do, but in practice 16 is just as arbitrary an age as 14 — and equally as tough to enforce. Instead of wasting their time in an investigation destined to go nowhere, gymnastic officials might think about revisiting the idea of a minimum age at all. If they're good enough to win — as the Chinese clearly were — does it really make a difference how old they are? – AP