The Giants Mara offered a blunt lesson in market-driven economics on WFAN radio this month. We have 130,000 people on our waiting list,-- he said. We could charge anything and still fill the stadium.

Mazel tov, but I won't be one of them. Not more than, say, once in a lifetime.

If the point of the olympics is to prove, "who is the best in the world?", then who cares what their age is?

You're argument seems to be that if someone cheats and wins, the other competitors are supposed to just suck it up and get over it. Why can't they cry foul if they have probable cause?

Of course they can cry foul. They just shouldn't be heartbroken that the foul happened, and if they get no satisfaction out of crying foul, well...it's time to shake the dust off your feet and move on.

As for being emotionally brittle with regard to losing, I really don't see that being the case here.

Not AFAIK with the athletes; some fans seem to be a different matter.

But you still made it a point to say, "I can't remember an Olympics recently with the kind of petty crap we've seen in these games..."

Whoa, where did this (and your prior comment) come from? All TBH was saying was that it was his impression that there was a lot of petty crap in this Olympics; that's not the same as saying that everything that happened was petty.

I'm confused. Is your point here that everyone should cheat to level the playing field or that the non-cheaters should just try their best knowing that others in the competion are creating their own advantage?

Neither. I'm saying that nobody should be surprised that there are elite athletes (or their parents or coaches or etc.) who will try whatever they think they might get away from in order to gain an advantage. So you "train yourself to a frenzy", get all worked up for your Big Moment, and go and compete in an environment where you know that everyone is trying to get an edge. For their own mental health, honest athletes should approach the situation a bit more cynically. Losing because someone else used an outside-the-rules advantage and didn't get caught is a fact of sports: it doesn't happen all the time, but it happens, and the higher the stakes, the more likely it's going to happen. Athletes have to want to win, but they also can't be so emotionally brittle, so dependent on winning that they can't handle losing -- for whatever reason. The Chinese gymnastics team has a history of underage athletes, and it seems it popped up again at this Olympics? Well...you knew it was a snake when you picked it up.

clones:

I don't call it sour grapes when you have trained yourself to a frenzy for four years, arrive at the Olympics at the height of your ability, only to have your chance at a medal stolen by someone who cheated.

Well, no, it's not exactly sour grapes, but in the words of the old story, "you knew it was a snake when you picked it up". Anybody who didn't just fall off the cabbage truck has to know that in high stakes competition, there's always some athlete who will try any stunt they can think of to get an advantage (or parent, coach, or official of a governing body who will encourage/enable/coerce them to do the same). This is a somewhat heartless thing to say, but I guess I don't understand why an athlete today would go to the Olympics and not expect to be up against against this kind of shenanigans as well as their opponent's athletic ability.

Unless the Chinese government can provide more records on there age other than a passport that of which they have complete control over on the information in it, they should be stripped of there medals

What record of your age is not controlled by your government?

What did the coach do to get banned for life?

Get the WTF mad at him. That's pretty much how it is in taekwondo.