The speculation regarding the Chinese girls was because of one girl in particular. Just last year it was being highly publicized all over the world how great she was at only 14...now a year later in the Olympics she's suddenly 16 and meets the age requirement.
How does
that work? They were saying that the required paperwork had been produced stating she was 16, but there had been alot of questions raised as to if it was forged, which now has them questioning the validity of the paper work for ALL the girls. The commentators were saying that as a result the Olympic board was already examining a more strict system for regulating 'proving' the age of competitors.
The new judging system where the performance and difficulty are scored separately is the result of the last Olymics where there were several scores giving inaccurately with the starting difficultly level having been misjudged and scored with too low a start value. It was an issue more than once the last time around and some of the errors were not discovered until after the medals has been awarded and nothing could really be done about it.Bela Karoli was saying that he disapproved of the new judging system because it was more confusing and seemed to be an easy way for biased scoring to be masked and that he thought in general there were unfair scores given to the US team.
Aside from that, what surprised me last night was the fact that Romania didn't even seem to be in the picture. Usually they are one of if not THE biggest threats and powerhouses in gymnastics and I only heard them mentioned once.