No term limits for Bruno Grandi

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In election news, and this is not an upset, Bruno Grandi (pictured at right) was reelected by ‘a sound majority’ of the 90 delegates who voted the Italian professor to his fourth consecutive four-year term as president of FIG, the international gymnastics federation.

It was Grandi who said, with a straight face, that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing when Yang Yun, a Chinese gymnast who won a bronze medal at the 2000 Olympics, said she was 14 at those Sydney Games. If that’s true, Yang would have been age-ineligible for competition. Grandi, who enjoys being called ‘Professor Grandi’ because he once served as a professor of physical education in Italy, said that Yang giving her own age in her own words during an interview on state-run Chinese television was not convincing proof of any wrongdoing by the Chinese gymnastics federation. ‘We trust the passport, not the Internet,’ Grandi said.

Grandi also proudly admired his federation’s grand accomplishment of increasing the age of participants at the Olympics even as documents by the dozens had been uncovered casting doubts on the ages of three Chinese gymnasts at the 2008 Beijing Games. The FIG’s post-Olympic investigation of those documents found nothing, nothing! However, that pesky Yang interview means Grandi’s group is still ‘investigating’ the 2000 Olympics. Thank goodness the good professor has another four years to figure out how to erase Yang’s words off that pesky Internet.

-- Diane Pucin