This one’s not going away. Its that tricky internet with its published facts. Betsy Newmark has more:
Apparently, the Chinese don’t understand how Internet caches work.
And the IOC just bent over for the Chinese pretending that it was enough to accept the passports that the Chinese government provided to legitimate the girls. The IOC is a disgrace. They were so afraid of angering China that they won’t even look into the matter. Does anyone believe that the IOC would have taken that position if the country alleged to be cheating were some small, less ominous country. What if the gold had been won by, say, Finnish 14-year olds? Or Israeli gymnasts? I doubt the IOC would have turned a blind eye then. Now that the Chinese have proven that countries can get away with blatant rules violations, look for more such manipulations in future games.
The Olympics long ago gave up on pretending that they celebrated amateur competition. Now they’re giving up pretending that they have rules that must be obeyed.
Gateway Pundit has the goods Betsy was referring to.
Communist countries are notorious for going to great lengths to perform well at the Olympics as a way to prove philosophical superiority. The tragic story of East German athletes is still one of sports greatest tragedies.
Andreas Krieger opened a shopping bag in his living room and spilled out his past: track and field uniforms, a scrapbook and athlete credentials from the former East Germany.
The photos on the credentials looked familiar, but the face was fuller and softer, the hair covering the ears and draping down the neck. This was Heidi Krieger, the 1986 European women’s shot-put champion, perhaps the most extreme example of the effects of an insidious, state-sponsored system of doping in East Germany.
The taking of pills and injections of anabolic steroids created virile features and heightened confusion about an already uncertain sexual identity, Krieger said, influencing a decision to have a sex-change operation in 1997 and to become known legally as Andreas.
”They killed Heidi,” Krieger said.
More than 14 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more than three years after criminal trials resulted in convictions of East Germany’s top sports official and sports doctor, Krieger and a number of other athletes are still trying to resolve legal, medical and psychological issues related to the secretive doping program that was known by the Orwellian euphemism of ”supporting means.” Many of the athletes were minors at the time and say they were given performance-enhancing drugs without their knowledge.
Here’s just how many athletes were involved:
As many as 10,000 East German athletes were involved in a state-sponsored attempt to build a country of 16 million into a sports power rivaling the United States and the Soviet Union, recent trials and documents of the East German secret police have revealed.
An estimated 500 to 2,000 former East German athletes are believed to be experiencing significant health problems associated with steroids, including liver tumors, heart disease, testicular and breast cancer, gynecological problems, infertility, depression and eating disorders. Some female athletes have reported miscarriages and have had children born with deformities like club feet.
I have little the doubt that Chinese girls are under age. The paper trail that Gateway Pundit provided confirms this. It begs the question of how many other Chinese athletes have been exploited and to what extent? What kind of involvement is there in these little girl’s lives do their parent’s have? Have reporters even seen them at the arena?
At any rate, Americans should note what real exploitation of athletes. i Its not our collegiate athletes who are rewarded with an opportunity for an education that is imeasurable in the benefit that comes not only for the athlete, but even for their families in the years that follow.
They can also say no – something I doubt the little Chinese girls can say.
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This post was written by bobsikes on August 16, 2008
