Doing their best to propagate the loutish Bela Karolyi’s rants about the age of female Chinese gymnasts, the NYT throws out this excellent bit of analysis:

Chinese Grab Gold in Gymnastics; U.S. Is Second – NYT

The Chinese gymnasts lack curves, have an average height of 4 feet 9 inches and weigh an average of 77 pounds. […] The women on the United States team, generally more muscular and shapely than the Chinese, are an average of 3 ½ inches taller and 30 pounds heavier.

I am guessing it is something as benign as misplaced nationalism that prompts the perverts at the NYT to wonder about the curves and shapeliness of young teenage girls. Fortunately, the lack of curves or shapeliness on the part of US, Chinese or other young female athletes will fail to make an impact on other sports fans … I hope!

Fortunately, the NYT redeems itself with this Op-Ed:

The Throwback – Creep Show – NYT

But most of all I will watch the enormously popular women’s gymnastics competition. The performances are incredible and fearless, but it isn’t the athleticism that draws me in. In fact I can’t think of any competition in the Olympics, or all of SportsWorld, more creepy and disturbing: these largely shapeless girls in their leotards and flaxen-waxen hair and bouncy-wouncy ponytails. “They look like girls from the neck up,” I was told by Joan Ryan, whose 1995 book, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” blew a sky-high lid off the sadomasochistic training regimens that young female gymnasts were being subjected to. She continued: “From the neck down they look like prepubescent boys.”

During the Olympics, when a female gymnast finishes an event and hugs her coach, often a man three times her age, I cringe at what I believe is the unsavory stench of the sport in general — children under the wing of men who based on lengthy documentation have proven to be abusive, relentless, intolerant, humiliating and, in some instances, accused of sexual misconduct. “These girls will do anything for these guys,” Ms. Ryan told me. “They have such control over them.”

Which also reminds us that if indeed we are looking for soft-porn masquerading as a sport, there is the ever popular beach volleyball (what next, strip volleyball?):

I will watch women’s beach volleyball, not because it’s a sport, but because skimpily-clad leggy women rolling in sand does put me in a state of excitement right up there with mud wrestling (no doubt the next sanctioned Olympic sport given NBC’s need for strong television ratings and the correct calculus that soft-core porn under the guise of sport does have its benefits).

And goes on to document what this race to the extreme entails:

Former United States Olympian Dominique Moceanu, who at the age of 14 was part of the 1996 team that won the overall Olympic gold, called for the ouster of Marta Karolyi, the coordinator of the women’s Olympic team, in a recent appearance on the HBO show “Real Sports.”

Moceanu told me she feels the training methods of Marta Karyoli and her legendary husband, Bela, are obsolete, outdated and center on intimidation. As a result, injuries are often ignored; Moceanu suffered a lower-leg stress fracture right before the Olympics in 1996 and says Marta Karolyi initially scoffed even though she collapsed twice one day while trying to train. But seeing as Marta Karolyi has helped produce 13 gold medals for the United States at world championships since 2001, don’t count on any changes, in particular if the women’s team finds itself drenched in gold in Beijing.

“Why is winning the only thing that matters?” asks Sey. “There must be some national crisis of self-esteem for us to push so hard for these medals. Otherwise why would you need it?”