Inspector Clouseau has done all his digging. The verdict is now in. International gymnastics leaders are pleased to trumpet the news that the Chinese gymnasts were of age at the 2008 Beijing Olympics — news that all good reasoning and independent reporting tells us cannot be true.

Much has been written and said about five of the six members of China's gold medal-winning women's gymnastics team, the little girls who said they were 16, probably were 14 and looked like they were 12.

Let's not blame the kids for this controversy; they merely were pawns in the hands of their conniving government, which happily encouraged them to risk injury, humiliation and who knows what else in the future so China could win a gold medal in the biggest showdown with the Americans in any sport at its Olympic Games.

Perhaps all that pounding on those girls' tiny hips, ankles and wrists is viewed as the ultimate act of patriotism by the Big Red Machine. Perhaps the term "growth plate" doesn't translate into Mandarin. Perhaps China's leaders care as much about the future health of the little girls who so dutifully represented their country as they do about, say, the milk they drink.

But give China's sports leaders their due: They do understand physics. The tinier the body, the better it spins and twists and flies through the air. Just like in figure skating, puberty is the enemy. Remember the uneven bars in Beijing? That's where the Chinese took the lead from the bigger Americans on their way to the team gold medal. Youth was served, and China's plan worked masterfully.

So the Chinese are celebrating today, their team gold medal and their other gymnastics medals safe and secure — and worth about as much in the world's eyes as all those East German swimming medals from the 1970s and 1980s, the ones earned through what was later learned to be state-sponsored steroids use by its young female athletes.

The Olympic record books still list the East Germans with their medals, but the international sports community knows that's a sham. And so it is with China's team gold medal. Because steroids don't play much of a role in gymnastics (obviously), what happened in Beijing has become the sport's doping controversy — gymnastics' Ben Johnson scandal, its Marion Jones saga.

The International Gymnastics Federation didn't have a positive drug test to bank on, or an admission of guilt, so its path to the truth was more torturous, based on numerous official Web site pages showing the Chinese girls to have been born in 1993 and 1994, not what the rules mandated, 1992.

When those Internet records began disappearing in front of observers' eyes, passports appeared, and so did other documents, hot off the presses, with the new, correct birth dates. China's gold was secured, although two members of its bronze medal-winning 2000 Olympic team are still being investigated.

Should we have expected a different outcome? Absolutely not. An international sports federation has neither the resources nor the guts to stand up to the Chinese, call them on their lies — and subsequently ruin their Olympics.

But perhaps some good will come of this. One would hope the Chinese, being forced to jump through a few embarrassing hoops in this little investigation, will never try to sneak underage girls into international competition again.

And that goes for you, too, Russia and Romania. The joke in the international sports community is that the United States and other Western nations are the dumb ones, because they don't doctor birth certificates.

Wouldn't it be something if the 2012 Games provide the first truly even playing field in women's gymnastics? It's about time. After all, what good is an age minimum if it's not adhered to by everyone?

Gymnastics really has no other choice, because if the cheating doesn't stop soon, one can envision a day when the women's Olympic gymnastics competition will be held at Chuck E. Cheese, with the battle cry, "May the best 10-year-old win."