This pre-teen, He Kexin deserves a gold medal in the uneven bars about as much as Bob Costas does. Even if she was 16 years old, the minimum age required to compete, (which she clearly is not) she in no way, shape, or form won this event.If there's one thing that everyone knows about gymnastics, (except for Australians, apparently) it's that falling down on your landing is a bad thing. That's the whole point. Anyone can swing around on some monkey bars and land on their face. Or anyone can jump off a spring board and collapse onto their hands and knees. Oh wait! That's exactly what China's Fei Cheng did in the vault finals! Not to mention that her hand positioning on the vault was so terribly uneven she she lost 7/10ths of a point. But somehow her blundering disaster of a vault scored higher than Alicia Sacramone's well-executed and perfectly-landed vault, thus bumping Sacramone out of the bronze medal position. Really? Really?
Getting back to I'm-five-years-short-of-puberty He Kexin. She made two technical errors on the bars, and then fumbled so much on her dismount that she actually crossed her legs. Crossing your legs in gymnastics is like screaming "bomb!" on an airplane - you just don't do it. But the judges from Australia and South Africa don't know this....no shit! Nastia Liukin, on the other hand, made one technical error, and had a flawless landing. But somehow they were both given the exact same score, at which point the nonsensical tie-breaking system awarded the gold to the person who performed worse, and who isn't old enough to be in the Olympics anyway. Spec-fucking-tacular.
After the $300 million opening ceremony in China, I was all giddy and excited. But between the murder of the father of a US volleyball player, and the blatant robbery of medals in women's gymnastics, I'm not quite as keen on China anymore.
I would normally turn my hopes for U.S. gold to Track & Field, but apparently the weed in Jamaica makes you run 28 miles per hour.
Thank God for Michael Phelps and his insane dolphin-esque double-jointedness, and his my-fingernail-is-1/100th-of-a-second-longer-than-yours awesomeness. Because if it weren't for all of the U.S. wins in swimming, the massive sleep deprivation from watching all the Olympic events combined with the Chinese bullshit would have sent me off a cliff by now.
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1 comment:
I'm somewhat conflicted by the Chinese age thing. For one thing, Americans wouldn't care if Luikin finished with the gold and Kexin finished with the silver.
Secondly, is the rule fair in the first place? She's fourteen. In four years she'll be 18. And then after that she'll be 22, which is probably too old to compete. In her sport, why should the rules restrict her from only being competitive at one Olympics? Because that's what would happen if they didn't allow her to compete this year. Rules are rules, and they should be followed, but this might be a rule (and it's a new one, by the way) that should be re-examined, especially in light of the nature of her sport.
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