Officials are all pretty much the same
I'm sure you've heard about the underage Chinese gymnasts by now. There's also something about some fellow named "Felpy", who did something noteworthy that's slipping my mind right now.
Well anyway. I found the Chinese official reaction the most entertaining part of them getting caught:
"We already explained this very clearly. There's no need to discuss this thing again."
The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) has said repeatedly that a passport is the "accepted proof of a gymnast's eligibility," and that He and China's other gymnasts have presented ones that show they are age eligible.
This reminds me of a status meeting I was in at my old job. Some task was checked off the Excel sheet as being done, but I had recently noticed a bug in it.
When I pointed out that it needed to be factored into the time needed to complete the project, I was told that it was already done. See, look at the spreadsheet. Right here. Checked. Done.
I can show you it's not done right now. Walk 30 feet to my desk and I'll show you how it's not working.
No need for that, silly! We already know it's done because the spreadsheet says so.
And so on.
posted by RWBB @ 8/17/2008 12:31:00 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
There have been an inordinate number of swimming world records broken this year. Every race seems to break a record. The US relay team smashed a world record in a qualifying round a week or so ago. There's a doping scandal here, just wait a little while.
In the 400x1 race we won by 0.008 seconds, the 5th place team also broke the old world record.
The new suits are supposed to cut down resistance significantly. I don't know how much that factors in, but I wouldn't expect it to be trivial. Also, it's Phelp's (et al) full time job to swim swim swim. 5 hours a day forever, basically. He also has perfected the underwater "dolphin kick" that is a big advantage.
All that said, surely there's some doping going on. I just learned about a (theoretical) undetectable gene therapy that could promote muscle growth or energy delivery (or whatever you want to target). They would have to sequence your DNA to find that.
I wonder how long before the Olympics becomes a glorified genetic engineering trade show?
It's sortof that now. The breeding and grooming of people phenomonal at their sport. Look at how china grabs kids and puts them into training, or how in the US, these same kids and/or their parents choose to do this sort of training.
Breeding, which is how we got dogs from wolves over thousands of years, and gene therapy are orders of magnitude apart in time scale. The central concern of the latter is, what are the unforeseen consequences?
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