THE observation by Matthew Pinsent, a man knighted for his prowess in winning four Olympic rowing gold medals, that he fears child abuse is systemic in Chinese preparations for the Games of 2008 and beyond, hit the hollow spot of the interlocking Olympic rings.

Nobody likes to doubt or disparage a man of Pinsent’s standing, but nobody in authority dares to probe his BBC radio reports stating that children as young as five in the People’s Republic of China are being subjected to training regimens and physical beatings we would not tolerate in training horses.

His allegations concern not simply the issue of human rights, which kept China outside the Olympic circles before. It is infant abuse, says Pinsent, in the name of sports.

The Sunday Times is familiar with the brush-off that the International Olympic Committee, and the British Olympic Committee, gave as a knee-jerk response to a thinking man’s complaint. As far back as 1977 this newspaper investigated 20 medical specialists in sport and child growth in 15 countries, East and West, and we surveyed the careers, the breaking points of 17 fledglings. Current court cases in Germany, brought by adults who were victims of the state decision to drug growing children in the name of sport, are repercussions of that era.

The IOC says we cannot take the interpretation of one Olympian, or the “third hand” observations he supplied. Similarly, this newspaper’s files of children abused, often with parental acquiescence, were dismissed as anecdotal.

But what can be done, even if officialdom dared to move on the subject? In Prague in 1977 a professor at a medical institute provided us with photographs of babies of seven months old climbing willingly up a gymnasium wall bar. They were part of a study into “motor precociousness”, not with the direct aim of grading them so young into sport, but the professor agreed his findings would be put into the hands of those who did intend to discover the potential in infants.

It was shocking then, and it is shocking now to Pinsent. He, having willingly trained under a ferocious regimen, indeed under a former East German trainer, throughout his teens and adult life, has crossed the divide from a sportsman giving almost anything and everything for pursuit of gold, into one of us, aghast at the potential cost to children.

In gymnastics, we have subscribed simply by watching it and by adoring the little tumbling dolls from the time of Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci, subscribed to what amounts to a freak show. Their acrobatic movements, their pliant little bodies, could perform gyrations beyond adults.

Age limits have supposedly been applied to halt this, but long ago paediatric specialists in this country and elsewhere identified the syndrome of “curiously environmental dwarfs”. These were the athletes whose puberty and growth were delayed, and one of the tools was thought to be maladministered contraceptive pills.

Sport massed together to exclude South Africa over apartheid, but child abuse has not so far been recognised. Pinsent is not the first to be shocked at first sight of what certainly looks like abuse. Journalists have been travelling to China for the past five or six years. They have been allowed in to screened examples of the committed work of some of the 400 sporting academies — schools where boys and girls from four or five years of age upwards are boarded and, in China’s own admission, hard driven.

Of the many children who enter this regime, children put like soldiers to the wheel, barely one in 1,000 stands any chance of reaching the holy grail of representing their country.

“I wondered whether the western approach is different to the eastern approach,” said Pinsent. “But I do think these kids are being abused.”

It was ever thus.