Edward, thanks for the kind comments. I don’t know whether you’ll still be checking this board, but I may as well offer my thoughts.
You’re certainly right that the FIG should have taken care of the matter in advance–and probably the Americans should have made sure that they did so. I don’t know what went on behind the scenes. Perhaps the Americans raised the issue, but the FIG was not willing to pursue it. Perhaps they did not raise the issue in the way they should have.
I think you should consider the consequences of your recommendation, though. It amounts to, ‘As long as we don’t catch you cheating beforehand, we’re not going to take the medal away from you afterward, even if we discover that you were cheating.’ If this were the policy, then teams could try to cheat, and wait and see whether the FIG would catch them; if the FIG stopped them, then they would pick different athletes who are over 16; if the FIG did not stop them, then they would field their underage athletes.
Ultimately, if the medal is taken away, it is the fault of the national team that decided to cheat in the first place–not the fault of the officials who run the sport or of the other teams who complained. If one cheats, one does not have the right to complain that you were not caught early enough.
Anyway, I think you can breathe easy, because I cannot imagine that the FIG really wants to get to the bottom of this, or that there will be sufficient proof that they were underage. So I think the Chinese girls will keep their medals. The girls did a fantastic job, and they seem really sweet. I really did not blame them at all; I blamed the coaches and administrators who decided to falsify papers and put underage girls in danger, and in general the oppressive sporting culture in China, ahead of these Games, that has been so determined to win medals that they have been willing to bend the rules. I only wonder what other rules were bent in other sports.
I love Chinese culture and the Chinese people–but I despise the government that constrains their freedom. I was hoping that this would not be a huge PR victory for the communist party, but I wanted the Games to reflect well on the Chinese people. Mostly it has.
