The gymnasts' age problem at the Olympics

In most cases, age is quite a sensitive question that one should be very careful to ask. Of course, one reason for this sensitivity is because of the "desired age" is always not what the real age: be that a teen wants to look older (to be taken seriously or ...) or I being happy whenever someone ask me which school I'm attending (trust me, this doesn't happen often, if at all).

The real reason behind this puzzle is that it is impossible to tell how old someone really is, at least not within a small margin of error, say 2 years. At the same time, unlike doping steroid, there is yet a test that you can trust. The bone age test have a fairly large margin of error (only ~80% accurate) that it can't be used with court-proof confidence, according to this study. Besides, it only tells the biological age, not chronological age.

X-ray radiography of a 9-year old girl with a bone age of 8.

Now you will understand that why everybody can speculate the chronological age of the small Chinese gymnasts: They can say whatever they want, there is just no true proof.

Disclosure: I'm not implying here that you should trust whatever government document says or everything from news media. For those in doubt, please check out what Cheney (or everybody in the Administration) said about WMD and the infamouse Jessica Lynch/Pat Tillman circus.

Here's a funny column about this by ESPN's Jim Caple.

"Hasn't the IOC been paying attention to American Olympic coverage over the decades? Our Olympians are always clean. It's the other athletes who cheat like foreign accountants in offshore tax havens."

"The Olympics aren't about which country wins the most gold medals; they're about which country wins the most medals, period. ... Besides, the "official" gold tally neglects all the multiple golds we've won on relay teams and in other team sports. This just isn't fair."

"Something, after all, must be done to prevent immature, underage girls from being thrown into an intense, pressure-packed international competition they are far too young to handle emotionally. Forcing a young girl to compete like that would be like entering a 6-year-old in a beauty contest, or a fifth grader in a national spelling bee, or expecting an 11-year-old boy to compete in a worldwide baseball tournament on national TV. Americans just don't believe in placing that kind of pressure on children."