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Gymnastics is child’s play - and it’s time to grow up

It’s not so terribly surprising that a 14-year-old girl should turn up in the, er, women’s gymnastics. If you create a sport in which 14-year-old girls excel, then 14-year-old girls will get sneaked in. It’s as inevitable as drugs: if drugs make you go faster, people will take drugs. And some of them will get found out.

Now there are two ways of looking at this. One is that we need better policing of birth certificates, but such matters are always open to manipulation. I remember a gymnast of impossible minuteness, and I’ll swear she had milk teeth. The other is to re-jig the terms of the sport so that it no longer favours pre-pubescents.

The marking of gymnastics is based on the fallacious notion that turning a somersault is equally difficult for all humans. It is not so: the smaller you are, the easier it is.

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Imagine Usain Bolt, who is 6ft 5in, turning a somersault: it’d be a gigantic thing, he’d have to leap miles in the air and stay up there for hours. For a mite, it’s all over in a nanosecond or two.

Gravity has different meanings for beings of different sizes. As J. B. S. Haldane wrote in his famous essay of 1928, On Being The Right Size: “You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mineshaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.”

The bigger you are the harder it is to work against gravity, and it gets harder at a geometric progression. But there is a payback, at least to the audience: a taller woman performing gymnastics is incomparably more graceful than a child. That’s because the moves are slower, more languorous, and higher above the ground. Svetlana Khorkina, the Russian diva, was 5ft 5in, and inevitably posed for Playboy to make the point (more than adequately, it must be said) that it is possible to find a woman in women’s gymnastics.

What the sport needs is a marking system that recognises that it is harder for grown-ups than children, and to reward them accordingly. You can do this in the marking as it happens, or by means of a handicap system based on height and weight, or by breaking the field into weight categories like the combat sports.

What the sport needs to understand is that pre-pubescent girls winning medals at the Olympic Games is unseemly, especially when they are lathered in make-up. Gymnastics should reward graceful and brilliant women, not precocious and freakish children.