BBC Sport have posted this article regarding the Chinese age scandal from 2000 Olympic Games where China were stripped of their women’s team bronze  as Dong Fangxiao was found to be 14 years old – two years too young to compete in the Games.

The Chinese officials have promised to enforce rigorous checks and processes to verify their gymnasts ages. These processes such as  x-ray bone analyses have already come into action for the upcoming Youth Olympics in Singapore where the delegation have gone through stringent checks.

Two age scandals in four Olympics Games has caused China great embarrassment and it’s good that they are proposing to prevent this from happening again. What are your thoughts?

With that in mind, it makes me think about funding in gymnastics. I was reading this article from the BBC Sport website yesterday which includes a small section about the amount of funding given to gymnastics and what it means to the sport. Sport England has allocated £11,388,481 to gymnastic national governing bodies for 2009 until 2013, with the hope that the numbers increase and gymnasts perform better although gymnasts such as Daniel Keatings and Louis Smith are still waiting for their gyms to be refurbished, with the Olympics coming closer and closer, they’d want to secure funding very soon to move passed the initial phase.

Admittedly, I haven’t looked too much into it but how much funding does gymnastics receive from governments / sports bodies in your country? We can see above what BBC Sport have reported, I’m sure there is more to find out. In a previous post, Irish Gymnastics secured an allocation for 2010  of €169,545 for the sport – encouraging as gymnastics was one of only 11 sports out of 59 funded that maintained their funding levels this year in a year where the Irish Sports Council’s budget was cut by 4%. In Ireland, gymnastics is considering more of a minority sport as the country has it’s main sports rugby, football and the GAA sports (Gaelic and Hurling). It would be interesting to see how much more successful Irish gymnasts could be if more money was pumped in, providing better training facilities and national support etc. I’d love to know how much funding USA Gymnastics, Australian Gymnastics etc receives and how the money is spent.

So it leaves me asking:

How much funding does gymnastics receive in your country?

What difference do you think more funding could make to gymnastics in your country?

Do you feel that the allocated money is being wasted and could be used more resourcefully?

If it was you who makes the decisions, what would you spend more money on? better coaches? better facilities?

I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts.

This day 2 years, will mark the beginning of the London 2012 Olympics. I’m keeping an eye today on the BBC website which has some live commentary throughout the day of todays events. At 2.15pm BBC One will be broadcasting a special show to mark the occasion. Follow the live commentary here.

In the next two years we will … continue building on the successes of the first years of this cycle and ensuring our results are progressive towards London, work towards keeping our gymnasts injury-free and illness-free, qualifying for as many places as possible through the series of World Championships in the Olympic disciplines during 2011, and focusing our resources towards a successful Olympic outcome.

Subdivision 1 -ITA, CHN, ARG, MX1

Subdivision 2 -JPN, NZL, SLO, UKR

Subdivision 3 -POL, ROU, BRA, ISR

Subdivision 4 -ISL, IND, SIN, BLR

Subdivision 5 -AUS, DEN, MX3, GRE

Subdivision 6 -RUS, SWE, FRA, GBR

Subdivision 7 -HUN, USA, RSA, PRK

Subdivision 8 -CAN, COL, AUT, CZE

Subdivision 9 -ESP, POR, BEL, ECU

Subdivision 10 -SUI, KOR, TUR, MX4

Subdivision 11 -MEX, GER

Subdivision 12 -UZB, NED, MX2, FIN

Trampolining gets a mention in todays Irish Times newspaper (good that gymnastics gets some sort of mention in the main stream news!)

Top FIG coaches visit Trinidad and Tobago for a 8 day Level 1 Men’s and Women’s Artistic Gymnastics courses

Wuhooo!! Great to hear this news this evening!

Paul Hamm is on the comeback, hoping to make another run at the Olympics.

The 2004 Olympic all-around gymnastics champion tells The Associated Press he has quit his job in the financial industry and is heading back to the gym to start training full-time, in hopes of making the U.S. team for the London Games in 2012.

Thanks to USA Gymnastics and Inside Gymnastics for posting the news on Facebook

** UPDATE** More on the comeback by Paul Hamm himself!

As gymnasts – we love getting new leotards. Often, as kids you don’t realise that the more sparkly and extravagant the leotards, the more Mums and Dads have to live in fear of washing them incorrectly!

Dance Mania has posted these great tips on how to look after your leotard. There’s great tips on how to wash your leotard, and how to dry it. Read more on Dance Mania

Douglas Fordyce and Edward Upcott clinched the Gold in the Mens Pairs.  Adam Buckingham, Alex Uttley, Jonathan Stranks and Adam McAssey also did exceptionally well to claim the gold in the Mens Four’s. Congratulations Guys!!

Read more on BBC Sport and More Than The Games

According to the article Nastia wants to move on to bigger and better things since achieving such a big goal at a young age. She’d like to become more involved in TV and go to college to study something in that line. Of course, there was a plug for her new clothing line too. I never take these gossip sites too seriously. It tends to happen that one gossip site reports something (often false) and the other sites pick it up and add bits on. So I’m still holding on for a proper announcement from Nastia’s website, until then she’s still a training gymnast to me!

I’d love to see Nastia come back, she’s a beautiful gymnast. My gymnasts idolize her, although in 2 years time when the 2012 Olympics are over, they’ll idolize another gymnast if she doesn’t come back and win the Games. There’s been no updates on Nastia’s site since earlier this year which is such a pity. She seems to be using a more direct approach of social media by Tweeting, although I rarely see her communicate with her fans who adore her.

What do you think? Should Nastia come back or should she continue on making money from advertising, sponsorship etc?