Women's Gymnastics Team Final!

There were two events that I definitely wanted to see during the Olympics: USA vs China in men's basketball and the women's gymnastics team final. Odd combination, I know, but ever since I watched Mary Lou Retton win the gold back in the day I've been a women's gymnastics fan.

As you know, I watched the game on TV since the $1,000+ for tickets was way too much. So it was time to try to get a ticket for the gymnastics final.
I put an ad on the Beijing expat website requesting one ticket for the event. I got a phone call last night someone wanting 200 Euros ($300+) for a ticket. I offered half that and he said no way...

I went to the Olympic park entrance this morning where there were plenty of people selling all sorts of tickets. Gymnastics tickets were going for RMB2,000+ (~300+). So I called the guy back from last night and asked if he still had a ticket -- he did, and we agreed on RMB1,500 ($200) .

He took forever to come to the location, and we kept in touch on our cell phones. The longer he took, the lower the price went. So when he finally showed up to make me 30 minutes late for the two-hour event, our price had dropped to RMB 400 ($58)!! ;-)

This was a very exciting day. The Americans came into the event trailing the Chinese by 1.5 points, but well ahead of the Romanians & Russians. After a Chinese gymnast fell off the beam, the US pulled within one point.

But then disaster struck:

This is a picture of Alicia Sacromone after she fell of the balance beam. She was docked points both for falling off the beam and for not being able to do one of the flips she was supposed to do because she had to hop back on the beam rather than use the platform to jump on. This definitely gave China breathing room...

She was able to put the fall behind her and completed a very strong routine other than the fall.

Then disaster struck the second time. Apparently Alicia wasn't able to put the fall off the beam completely behind her as the next (and last) event was the floor exercise. On her first tumbling pass she fell on her bum and then her back, then on the third tumbling pass she stepped out of bounds:

And just like that (and some other mistakes on the first day that put the US in the hole to begin with), the heavily-favored US team, with the two best gymnasts in the world, took silver as a team.

One question, however. The minimum age for competition is 16. Does anybody think the Chinese girls look 16? Just look at the body types: the Americans are fit young women, the Chinese are undeniably girls:

For more on the age controversy you can look at this Time magazine article: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1832312,00.html
The article says that this American team is on average 3.5 inches taller and 30 pounds heavier than the Chinese team. If in fact the Chinese girls are 16 (highly doubtful), maybe gymnastics can divide itself into divisions like boxing and weighlifting... you know, weight classes. The Chinese can compete in the super-light weight class and the Americans can compete in the healthy-weight class ;-)

Some other random pictures from the event:

Even the Olympic mascots, the "Fuwas," do gymnastics!

Great day, great event... incredible to see this in person. There is so much going on and it's amazing to see the athletes compete in my favorite Olympic competition.