Well, I failed to protest the Olympic games as I was planning to do in 2001. I couldn’t help watching them, and was glad I did. Maybe it was for the love of the best in man. Maybe it’s because China is so great in so many ways and holds so much potential. Or maybe it’s because NBC scrapped the mind-numbingly boring mini-docu-dramas on every American athlete in favor of showing actual sports. Regardless, there’s one thing I’m especially looking forward to now that the games are over: the end of people bitching about the underage Chinese gymnasts.

Just like people’s attitudes towards steroids are based on other people Disobeying Rules rather than on actual concern for health, the ageist gymnastic fans are more concerned about losing to the Chinese.

Let’s ask an obvious question: if the best athletes in a particular sport might be younger than 16, why do we have a minimum age requirement for competition? Note that the rules don’t say the kids can’t start training until a particular age. No one seems to give a shit if a Chinese family gives up its only young at age 3-months and ships her off to an Olympic training factory. The problem people have is when the little girl starts kicking the shit out of the Americans. She should train two more years and then really embarrass us. Give the 16-year-olds the chance to win their medals without any interference from better athletes.

This is the same mentality that boycotts T-shirts made in “sweatshops” without an ounce of remorse for what happens to the families who lose income if the factory closes down. It’s known as hypocrisy. More accurately, it’s the conscious phoniness of substituting a moral cause for whatever bullshit desire you’re trying to rationalize. “I want us to win” becomes “they’re not following the rules”, or “the poor girls shouldn’t be made to compete so young”.

Should there be a minimum age? No. Should we care about how children are treated in countries we compete against in the Olympics? Sure, but there’s plenty of time to do that while their children aren’t out-flipping your children. You know, try to at least give the appearance that you’re not completely full of shit. All this bitching and moaning (fueled by the New York Times trying to make itself relevant) should have been harnessed and directed at the real injustice: the idiotic IOC rule that prevents a sport’s best athletes from competing. Or, maybe a tad more important, that the IOC allows athletes from countries that support terrorism to compete. Which is morally worse: a 14-year-old who competes against an American, or an Iranian who won’t compete against an Israeli?

And another thing, how come nobody cares that male athletes can’t get themselves up onto the horizontal bar? Don’t we have any minimum height requirements?