China's big, tiny win

Chinese blow out U.S. team, but is the victory worth it?

BEIJING -- You have to watch ''women's'' gymnastics with one eye closed. Shut down your conscience and watch the beauty of the movements, the power and guts of the girls.

I mean women.

So, through the good eye, China was fantastic Wednesday morning, routing the United States in one of the great rivalries of the Olympics. China won gold, the United States silver by a difference of 2.375 points. They don't measure perfection in nice, neat 10s anymore, having changed the scoring system. Know this: 2.375 points is a blowout. I'm pretty sure. If not, it should be because the U.S. team wasn't even close. China was flying poetry. while the United States was Alicia Sacramone falling off the beam and falling on the floor routine.

''It's hard to stay on the balance beam,'' U.S. coach Liang ''Chow'' Qiao said. ''But you can't afford two falls.''

But through the bad eye, China's women were so tiny, so skinny, so young that it was impossible to forget about the age-limit scandal, though not so much over the salaciousness of China theoretically doctoring passports to get young girls past age requirements and into the Olympics. Mixed in with the ability to fly around fluidly on the uneven bars, I can't help but wonder about the emotional and physical torture these girls go through.

''They are using half-people,'' said Bela Karolyi, the face of U.S. women's gymnastics and maybe, heaven forbid, even the conscience. ''One of the biggest frustrations is, what arrogance. These people think we are stupid.

''We are in the business of gymnastics, and we know what a kid of 14 or 15 or 16 looks like. You don't have to be a gymnastics coach to know what they look like at 16.''

Don't get the wrong idea and think the outcry over the Chinese women's gymnastics team is a moral thing. Olympic rules require a woman to turn 16 during the Olympic year. And evidence is pretty strong that at least three Chinese girls are younger than that.

They just so happen to be the ones who turned this thing into a blowout Wednesday when they dominated the uneven bars.

Do you know how old Karolyi's project, the woman who first made him famous, Nadia Comaneci, was when she had all those perfect 10s. She was 14.

''Some,'' Karolyi said, ''are mature enough to handle it.''

See, Karolyi isn't outraged at the idea of a 14-year-old, 69-pound girl in the Olympics. This is not an aberration. It's a movement. And do you know who's responsible? Karolyi. He actually thinks the age limit should be lifted entirely.

He isn't worried about the effects on young girls' minds and bodies. He's upset that China can do it but the U.S. can't because of those pesky rules. He was upset that his wife's team -- Martha Karolyi serves, basically, as the U.S. team's general manager -- was going to have a hard time beating China.

It always comes back to the same thing with women's gymnastics: Gold at the cost of abusing young girls is seen only as gold.

Bela Karolyi has no official title anymore, and your first thought on that should be to be thanking God he doesn't have his hands on young girls anymore. That wasn't a sexual reference but an abuse reference. So maybe his thoughts don't reflect those of USA Gymnastics?

Well, his wife is still in charge. And they use his ranch. And it's all too, too close for comfort.

It's time for USA Gymnastics to make a clean split from the Karolyis. Just say no. Everyone has closed the wrong eye for far too long.

Karolyi said he wondered if the Chinese team brought diapers to the Olympics. The position of the world gymnastics governing body is that rules call for passports to show age, and China produced those passports.

He laughed at the idea of taking seriously these documents issued by the Chinese government, saying this is just one of those little unspoken secrets everyone already knows.

You know, these age restrictions should be called the Karolyi Rule. It was people with his methods, maybe specifically him, that led to the need for it.

I mean, Karolyi is the one who started the American movement toward drilling little girls into the Olympics, pounding on and abusing their bodies with excessive training and weight requirements -- shh, don't say the words ''eating disorders'' -- until these girls either broke or became champions.

Just say goodbye to the Karolyis, thank them for all the medals, hold your nose over the other stuff and head right for Chow and his little gym in Des Moines.

I've always loved watching gymnastics. My grandfather used to do it in his Czech Sokol. But seeing this in person is too much. From the TV, you don't see how tiny these girls are, mostly because they're on the screen alone, with no one standing next to them for good measure.

China's Jiang Yuyuan and Yang Yilin weigh 138 pounds. Combined. The team average? It's 4-9, 77 pounds.

In fairness, the U.S. team average is 5 feet, 107 pounds, which sounds tiny but not tortured. Shawn Johnson trains no more than 25 hours a week, on the insistence of Chow, her coach. The others drill twice as much.

This isn't a China problem; it's a gymnastics problem. We've traded conscience for medals for far too long.

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