Concerns over eligibility on the six-member team surfaced before the Olympics and have continued all week.

“One of the girls has a missing tooth,” Karolyi said, suggesting that the gymnast was so young that she lost a baby tooth and had yet to have a permanent one emerge.

The grin of Deng Linlin, a Chinese gymnast who is listed as 16, indeed revealed a wide gap. To be eligible for the Olympics, gymnasts must turn 16 this year.

“I have no proof, so I can’t make an affirmation,” Karolyi said. “But it possibly could be true. That doesn’t give an even playing field. Certain countries go by the rules, and certain countries may not.”

China’s coach, Lu Shanzhen, bristled when the age issue arose again on the day his gymnasts had upset the Americans, the reigning world champions. He would not explain Deng’s missing tooth.

“It’s unfair that people keep saying the Chinese are too young to compete,” Lu said in Mandarin, on his way out of the National Indoor Stadium. “If they think they can tell someone’s age just by looking at them, well, if you look at the foreign athletes, they have so much more muscles than the Chinese. They are so strong. Do you then say that they are doping?”

Half the team — He Kexin, Yang Yilin, Jiang Yuyuan — would be under age, according to online sports registration lists in China. The international gymnastics federation, however, said those gymnasts were eligible and that the ages on their passports were correct.

Yang, who turns 16 at the end of the month, said, “It’s unreasonable for people to think I’m too young.”

Because China and the United States competed on the same events each rotation, it was easy to notice differences in their body types. The Chinese gymnasts lack curves, have an average height of 4 feet 9 inches and weigh an average of 77 pounds. Deng is the smallest, at 4-6 and 68 pounds. The women on the United States team, generally more muscular and shapely than the Chinese, are an average of 3 ˝ inches taller and 30 pounds heavier.

They looked young. Very young.

But oh, can they twist and tumble and fly from top to bottom on the uneven bars like the lightest of feathers.

It's difficult to write about female athletes who compete in sports that put a premium on small, compact bodies. Calling them tiny seems disrespectful and sexist. They're athletes who happen to be small, no less skilled than a basketball player or swimmer.

These Chinese gymnasts are tiny.

Pre-teen tiny. Haven't-lost-all-their-baby-teeth-tiny.

Liang Chow, a Chinese native who coaches U.S. standout Shawn Johnson, gracefully and smilingly conceded that China deserved to win.

Asked if he believes the Chinese team members are 16 -- the age minimum to compete in the Olympics or world championships -- his expression became stern.

"I don't want to make any comment on that because that's not in my area," he said. "I believe the officials will deal with it. Leave it at that."

If the gold medals around their necks weighed almost as much as they do, the international gymnastics federation has only itself to blame.

Pushing gymnasts to perform bigger and more dangerous tricks is a noble idea. This is its downside. The elegance of the sport has largely been obliterated by stick-figured girls who can twist their bodies more tightly, soar higher, tumble faster and score more points than girls who are on the far side of puberty.

The ages of at least three Chinese women -- Jiang Yuyuan, He Kexin, and Yang Yilin -- have been questioned based on conflicts between online registration records and birthdates on their government-issued passports. Gymnasts must turn 16 in the year of the Olympics or world championships to be eligible for that competition, but records provided for lower-level events showed all three are 14.

FIG, the federation that governs international gymnastics, has said it accepts the Chinese passports as valid. The International Olympic Committee has said the same. If it truly had any doubts the IOC would probably have remained silent, anyway, so eager has it been to praise its Chinese hosts for reasons both merited and arguable.

Bela Karolyi, the former gymnastics guru in Romania and the U.S. and now a TV commentator, has been outspoken in saying the Chinese girls are too young and called them "half-people."

Claims of questionable officiating and even cheating flared Wednesday with the Olympic gymnastics, shooting and boxing competitions coming under fire.

Australian veteran shooter Russell Mark alleged that Chinese judges, influenced by a boisterous home crowd, helped local hope Hu Binyuan win the Double Trap bronze medal.

Mark, 44, the Atlanta Games gold medalist who finished fifth in the event here, told Australian media those local judges had awarded a hit to Hu even though he missed the target.

"One of them clearly he missed," Mark was quoted as saying. “I don't think anyone out there thought he hit it. If that had been for a gold medal, I would have been protesting.”

“The referees have to be in unison but there was a lot of doubt about a lot of the shots out there,” he said. "I'm glad it wasn't for a gold medal because that is all that this Games would have been remembered for unfortunately."

Asked if the judges deliberately ruled in Hu's favor, Mark said: “I'd hate to think that but you get the feeling out there, when someone clearly misses, all the shooters out there can tell if he missed or hit it. Everybody stopped.”

Mark said the judges may have been influenced by the boisterous crowd of 10,000 that cheered the Chinese shooter on.

"The crowd were yelling and calling shots in and out," he said. "It was like a circus out there. It would have been a brave Chinese judge that would have put his hand up [to signify a miss]."

Judging controversies have also blighted the boxing tournament.

China's Gu Yu caused an upset by defeating Joe Murray, the bantamweight world bronze medalist, on Tuesday but afterwards his camp was adamant he had been on the receiving end of some questionable verdicts.

They implied that the home fighter had been favored.

"I knew what it was going to be like. I've been watching the scoring the past few days and I knew it was bad. So I was expecting it," Murray said.

"They were giving him points for anything but when I was hitting him they were not giving me points," he said.

British head coach Terry Edwards added: "I thought they were very generous to the Chinese lad. You expect a slight bias but you come to the Olympic Games and you also expect a level playing field."

The British weren't the only ones unhappy.

Ukraine appealed against the 10-8 verdict given Monday in favor of China's Hu Qing over its lightweight Oleksandr Klyuchko.

I wouldn't say its cheating.... breaking the rules, yes

An advantage for younger gymnasts is that they are lighter and, often, more fearless when they perform difficult maneuvers, said Nellie Kim, a five-time Olympic gold medalist for the former Soviet Union who is now the president of the women’s technical committee for the Swiss-based International Gymnastics Federation.

“It’s easier to do tricks,” Kim said. “And psychologically, I think they worry less.”

It's not like USA athletes haven't been caught using illegal substances.

Online records listing Chinese gymnasts and their ages that were posted on official Web sites in China, along with ages given in the official Chinese news media, however, seem to contradict the passport information, indicating that He and Jiang may be as young as 14 — two years below the Olympic limit.

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In Chinese newspaper profiles this year, He was listed as 14, too young for the Beijing Games.

The Times found two online records of official registration lists of Chinese gymnasts that list He’s birthday as Jan. 1, 1994, which would make her 14. A 2007 national registry of Chinese gymnasts — now blocked in China but viewable through Google cache — shows He’s age as “1994.1.1.”

Another registration list that is unblocked, dated Jan. 27, 2006, and regarding an “intercity” competition in Chengdu, China, also lists He’s birthday as Jan. 1, 1994. That date differs by two years from the birth date of Jan. 1, 1992, listed on He’s passport, which was issued Feb. 14, 2008.

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The other gymnast, Jiang, is listed on her passport — issued March 2, 2006 — as having been born on Nov. 1, 1991, which would make her 16 and thus eligible to compete at the Beijing Games.

A different birth date, indicating Jiang is not yet 15, appears on a list of junior competitors from the Zhejiang Province sports administration. The list of athletes includes national identification card numbers into which birth dates are embedded. Jiang’s national card number as it appears on this list shows her birth date as Oct. 1, 1993, which indicates that she will turn 15 in the fall, and would thus be ineligible to compete in the Beijing Games.

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Yang Yun of China won individual and team bronze medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and later said in an interview on state-run television that she had been 14 at the time of those Games. A Hunan Province sports administration report also said later that she had been 14 when she competed in Sydney.