OlympicsL Gmnastics, Team - women

Okay so I have always had a love of the gymnastics - it started before kindergarten when my brother, who was 10 yrs older than I, joined the high school gymnastics team ... well that's actually kind of misleading because our school went from grades 7 - 12 and the coach let him start a tad early because he loved it so much.

my folks often told the story of how I insisted that I get a set of white underwear just like my brother - they even had a photo of he & I - he in his uniform tights, me in my white tights, white gotchas, and my white sleeveless t-shirt tucked into the gotchas ... well they used to have a photo of it.

When I was 16 my brother found a huge gaudy locket in silver that he had picked up at some garage sale (my family loved garage sales ... with 7 kids you had to) and gave it to me - well at least that's the way I remember it ... he might think differently. Any how .... I took that photo and made sure I put it in that particular locket.

In high school I wanted to be on the gymnastic team so badly, even though I could tumble worth spit .... I loved the horse though, and the beam ... but I had very bad vision and very thick glasses (1/2" on the edges, 1/16" in the center) and mom silently discouraged the gym teacher from letting me try for much outside of what was necessary for classroom credit.

How I missed it all ... I did get to stay for a while after school and give it a go -- we had a transfer student and Ms. Cebela realy encouraged her, and often paired us together (I thought it was so she could work with me a bit) ... but alas - no gynnastics for me. [sigh] so now I am forced (?) to watch it every four years and think 'what if'...

Now I'm watching the Olympics in Bejing .... and I'm watching the routines of both China and USA .... and the scoring is amazing me. China and the USA teams went neck and neck thru the whole thing - they were paired up for the rounds and they kept pace with each other....until the balance beam.

Then I saw a big difference in how the teams were being scored (first, let me get this out of the way -- if the one girl is 16 sometime this year I'm a gold medal olympian myself) ... on the beam the China girls were doing an AWFUL lot of balance checks that should have been .1pts off for each one, one gal should have lost an entire pt because of the number of checks.

We had, okay okay, USA had some real issues including a fall off the beam (as did the Chinese) but the routines were strong, difficulty was great and except for one where there was a single step, all the landings were stuck.

The unevens - wonderful job by both teams. I did think the small (questionable aged) girl could have straightened out those handstands a bit more, but it may have been the camera angle.

The floor routines - omgs...did the judges totally ignore all the balance steps of the last Chinese tumblist??? it was incredible - I thought for sure we had it all locked up with those wabbles.

But China took it ... we got silver. I'm sorry - but I've got to think that the olympic judges are really pandering to China when it comes to the objective scoring, not just in gymnastics either...in the archery rounds I saw there were shots that were 'lines' but clearly on the smaller score yet they were given that higher score (giving a 9 instead of the 8).

Oh well - we are cleaning up in swimming ... where Phelps won a gold medal with his eyes shut - literally - his goggles kept filling with water so he swam most of the way with his eyes closed so they wouldn't get burned by the clorine `` amazing! i just hope it doesn't turn out that he is taking anything that will get him suspended or stripped of his medals.