I completely agree. Look at the one on the far right! She could pass for like... 5.
I thought it was pretty sad how they were talking about how one of the girls on the Chinese team has only seen her family once a year since the age of 3 because her parents immediately sent her to gymnastics school.
That's how kids put in gymnastics live though over in countries like China and Russia. They're trained to be Olympians from a young age with no distractions. And most of the time, it's seen as an honor for their country. It's just how their culture is.
Actually, the only difference between girls there and here is that most of the girls from the US have parents as coaches, so they see them all the time. Gymnasts who go for Olympic settings live at the gym; gymnastics is their life.
And yeah, I totally agree with them not being 16. The oldest one (the one all the way to the left) is 20 or so they say, but she was in the Olympics last year so obviously she had to be 16 then. She's probably just about sixteen now. What I don't get though, is how it's more advantageous to put younger girls into the olympics, other than the guarantee that they'll be young enough physically for the next olympics to get possibly another gold medal.
I think its the size advantage, the Chinese girls are so much smaller than the rest of the gymnasts. Compare the Romanian girls on the right to the Chinese - they're one step lower and the same height as the Chinese. I think I read about how only one American girl is under 5 feet or something and I think all the Chinese girls are under 5 feet, like 4'6-4'10, and under 100 pounds.
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I thought it was pretty sad how they were talking about how one of the girls on the Chinese team has only seen her family once a year since the age of 3 because her parents immediately sent her to gymnastics school.
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Actually, the only difference between girls there and here is that most of the girls from the US have parents as coaches, so they see them all the time. Gymnasts who go for Olympic settings live at the gym; gymnastics is their life.
And yeah, I totally agree with them not being 16. The oldest one (the one all the way to the left) is 20 or so they say, but she was in the Olympics last year so obviously she had to be 16 then. She's probably just about sixteen now. What I don't get though, is how it's more advantageous to put younger girls into the olympics, other than the guarantee that they'll be young enough physically for the next olympics to get possibly another gold medal.
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I think its the size advantage, the Chinese girls are so much smaller than the rest of the gymnasts. Compare the Romanian girls on the right to the Chinese - they're one step lower and the same height as the Chinese. I think I read about how only one American girl is under 5 feet or something and I think all the Chinese girls are under 5 feet, like 4'6-4'10, and under 100 pounds.
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