The Women's Gymnastics 2008 Olympic Scandals

The women's gymnastics competitions at the 2008 Olympics have involved nothing but one controversy after another. The first was the debate over the Chinese gymnasts' ages. The second has actually been a series of obvious judging errors. Is this favoritism for the host country or political prejudice from the judges?

No one can say for certain how old the Chinese gymnasts really are except the gymnasts themselves. Apparently, this isn't the first time the Chinese have placed an underage gymnast in the competition. The 2000 Olympics sported a 13 year gymnast who was magically 16 for two week duration of the games. Is it such a stretch that China may simply be doing the same thing again? After all, if your gymnast later admits she was underage, yet nothing was done, why not do it again?

It has become obvious to the world that the International Olympic Committee would rather just ignore the whole thing. Would they clearly ignore the allegations if China wasn't the host country, or if another country was on the chopping block? No one really knows.

However, if China really is using underage gymnasts, perhaps they should consider 16 year olds in 2012. Honestly, the Chinese gymnasts are making one mistake after another. Maybe a few more years of experience and training may actually make for better gymnasts. The US Olympic gymnastic team has made its share of errors as well, but at least we accept it and go on with life. We even live with glaring deductions for errors we didn't make.

Several times, the women's gymnastics judges have been called for either making too many deductions or not enough. Has anyone else noticed it's always the Chinese gymnasts with little or no deductions, even after falls, bad landings, and less than graceful balancing acts? Even though Nastia Liukin somehow managed to take the gold medal away from the Chinese after being shorted for a perfect landing, she was cheated out of the gold a second time due to a tie.

The Chinese gymnast falls, but no deductions are taken. The American gymnast nails the landing to tie the flawed Chinese routine, but ties are not allowed in women's gymnastics. Therefore, a computer decides the American routine needs another deduction. Would this have happened had the judges scored the routines correctly to begin with? We can speculate all we want, but the odds are, no, there would not have been a tie to worry with at all.

Now it's time to speculate as to why these issues are even occurring to begin with. As mentioned above, there are two possible reasons. The first is because the Chinese rarely do well in the women's gymnastics competitions and since they are the hosts, they want to win. The second is politics. And yes, politics do play a role in the Olympics, no matter how neutral we all pretend the judges are.

Perhaps the panel of judges for these particular gymnastic events is being bought off to score the Chinese differently. Perhaps the IOC has chosen to look the other way to prevent any political scandal with the Chinese. After all, how many people really want to take on China?

If money and hosting aren't the problem, maybe China isn't at fault at all, except for the whole underage gymnast issue. The judges may simply have political bias against the United States. That's fine outside the Olympics. However, these girls, not just the US team, but all the gymnasts, work extremely hard and deserve to be treated fairly. They didn't start any of the wars going on around the world. They've been too busy practicing and competing to reach the Olympics. Now they're going to be humiliated in front of millions because of something their country did?

Either way you look at it, the only ones who are truly suffering are the athletes. If the gymnasts are too young, they know it and have to deal with their own consciences. If gymnasts are being judged unfairly, it's their reputation and career on the line. It's their medal being lost. The country isn't gaining or loosing anything. The country isn't competing. It's the athletes.

The Olympics should be neutral, but the women's gymnastic competition has proven this to be false. We can only hope London will learn from the mistakes being made and try to make the Olympics a little less controversial in 2012. Things will certainly go wrong, but they will simply serve as lessons to the next host country and so on. Instead of blaming China or the Chinese gymnasts, perhaps we should all take a step back and see how the world's arguments affect everyone, not just political officials and the military.