On Tuesday, the U.S. men's gymnastics team took a bronze medal and celebrated like crazy. The Americans lost their two experienced Olympians, the Hamm brothers, before the Games to injuries. With two replacement athletes, the U.S. performed very well, led by Jonathan Horton. He just finished his career at Oklahoma this past spring.
The U.S. men were beaming while talking to the media, looking at their bronze medals as if they could hardly believe they had them.
Then Wednesday ... it was an entirely different mood for the U.S. women. They were the reigning world champions, but injuries had affected them, too. In a head-to-head battle - it hardly seemed the other six teams were even there; Romania got the bronze _ the Chinese prevailed with the gold.
And the U.S. women seemed a bit downcast. Especially the oldest of them, Alicia Sacramone. She had a few key errors that really cost the Americans, but teammate Nastia Liukin consoled her by saying it could have happend to any of them.
The women's gymnastics competition can never seem to be without some sort of controversy, and this one isn't either. Since 1997, there has been a rule in place that to compete in the Olympics, a gymnast must be at least 16 during that year.
Various media reports have questioned the age of three of the Chinese gymnasts. Past documentaion on all three suggests they are not older than 14.
(Nadia Comaneci was 14 when she starred at the 1976 Montreal Games, incidentally.)
Women's gymnastics long ago largely left behind the "women" part and turned into a freakish showcase for delayed puberty. The 1997 age-limit rule was put in place to try to counter that and lessen the physical toll on younger gymnasts.
The Chinese insist that past documenation was erroneous and all its gymnasts meet the age requirement.
The International Olympic Committee, the international governing body for gymnastics (FIG) and even USA Gymnastics all seem to not want to do anything to even address China's age issue.
The IOC's utter dismissal of the issue - suggesting it must take the word of each nation's governing bodies and doesn't have time to check ages _ makes you wonder why the organization wouldn't be as concerned with investigating this issue as it with perfomance-enhancing drug use. Or are some rules OK to break if they're just too hard to enforce?
The New York Times' and Associated Press' reporting of the issue suggests there is significant available evidence of age fraud _ if the IOC or FIG were interested in doing any of their own research.