Great post - and more of my many comments

1) Of all the censorship in the People's Republic... of all the censorship in it related to the Olympic Games, or strengthened because of them... why is exactly this issue the one that calls attention??? Why not the Lhasa demonstrations?? Why not the evictions and demolitions in Beijing proper and environs??? Sorry but I do find worthy of a second thought the fact that precisely this case was used to illustrate censorship in the PRC.

2) As much as I like to watch the Olympics... I wonder why on earth we common people continue listening to and taking seriously the IOC. If the Games are good, it's hardly the achievement of the IOC, and very much the achievement of the athletes and Organising Committees... If I were the IOC, I'd certainly be doing a lot of things a lot differently... And remember - these are the same guys who have done away with baseball, and continuously refused to include in the Games golf, rugby, cricket, netball, chess and auto racing, but keep sailing and equestrian in the schedule (*note)... quite the coherent guys... Oh, and did I mention they haven't returned Andreea Raducan's medal, even though pseudo-ephedrine (**note) is no longer banned???

(* I mean no disrespect to practitioners or fans of either - but you have to live in a different planet than I do if you think they are more deserving of an OG place than the sports I just mentioned...)

(** Like pseudo-ephedrine improved the performance of a gymnast... these are not the 10km, guys...)

3) Would you like to win it on the table??? Sincerely, if I was any girl of the American silver medal winning team, I would be quite angry at the protest, and would try to make it known. All this is doing is making the USA look like spoilt crybabies who cannot win it in the dome and have to resort to this to win it. This is not a case of doping, or of corrupt or biased judging, in which you can argue the results themselves are meaningless. This is a case of being defeated in the field and having to resort to another means to try to win it. In the end, the story everyone watched on TV and the story the newspaper and internet pics tell (and will always tell) to everyone is that the Chinese team won fair and square. Because age is not a form of cheating, unlike what the USA might think (...you only have to look at how people think Obama is "too young" or McCain "too old" to realise Americans have some problems...). Any likely eventual gold attributed to the American team will have no meaning, because of how it was won.

I used to think Olympic spirit meant to be gracious in victory and in defeat alike. "If I don't win I will raise a protest" is hardly that...

4) SpeedRacer: The Americans don't look 12. None of this Games' American gymnasts looks any younger than 14, assuming average development. Study all the external physical changes that females undergo during puberty, all the way from clearly prepubescent to clearly postpubescent; and match every one of them with the average ages at which they happen. I didn't watch the US nationals or the US OG qualifiers, but I assume others who didn't qualify didn't look much younger either...

Yes, they look like short, lean, small-breasted teens (which is, after all, what they are) - but that is not the same as looking 12.

In contrast, look at the whole of the Chinese team. Among the Chinese girls, you'll find some that look decidedly to be barely undergoing puberty, and I would say even downright prepubescent. You can weasel part of it out as due to racial differences between Chinese and Westerners - and part of it probably is that, sure enough; but really, if I was assessing the age of a Western girl with the body of Deng Linlin, I'd say she's 10, and I'd put Yang Yilin at 11 and Li Shanshan at 12, hands down...

In any case, what we watched, we watched - China won.

As did Andreea Raducan in 2000.