Sunday afternoon, Fourth-Place Medal colleague Nick Friedell linked the AP story regarding gender verification lab testing at the Olympics. As the New York Times reports, this isn't exactly new to Olympic games:

Experts at the lab, located at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, will evaluate cases based on their external appearance and take blood samples to test hormones, genes and chromosomes, said Prof. Tian Qinjie of the college hospital, according to the Xinhua news agency.

Gender verification tests emerged in the 1960s when Communist countries in Eastern Europe were thought to be using male athletes in women’s competitions. The tests were used at the Olympics for the first time at the 1968 Mexico City Games.

The downside to this testing is that certain chromosomal problems could cause a woman to fail a test, even though such abnormalities would not give her a competitive advantage. At the Atlanta Games in 1996, eight female Olympians initially failed tests but were

A few links for Monday ...

Meet the Fuwa ... You will be seeing a lot of them over the next month. They are the official mascots for the Beijing Games, and have become popular figures in China ... they even have their own cartoon series ... (CCTV)

It looks like most of the Nike swooshes have been wiped away in Beijing ... (Shanghaiist)

Can you imagine getting all the way to China to see your child compete in the Olympics, and then not have a ticket to watch their event ... somebody has got to help out these parents ... (CTV)

Beijing taxi companies plan on providing eight language services during the Olympics ... something tells me this will not end well ... (People's Daily Online)

Not only is the Internet slow in the Media Village ... it also costs a lot of money ... (Slashdot)

USA Basketball team arrives in Macau ... Carmelo Anthony says he slept during the entire flight ... all the way from Vegas ... (AFP)

China cares more about soccer success than winning dozens of Olympic golds or it's booming economy, contends a Chinese sports historian in a recent Washington Post editorial. The only problem is, China sucks at soccer. Like, really, really badly.

Xu Guoqi says hundreds of millions of Chinese people only care about winning a soccer medal at these Olympics, yet points out that the Chinese National team recently lost to Iraq in a World Cup qualifying match. Iraq! That'd be pathetic even if Iraq wasn't in its current state.

Why would a country love a sport they're unable to play? Xu attempts to explain (the Chinese think they invented soccer, it's the most democratic of games, etc.) but I still don't understand. Why invest so much pride in something so terrible? I mean, there's a reason Phoenix isn't a football town.

Read the whole column, if only so you get to the final line, which is unintentionally awesome.

When watching the Olympics, we often only see the glory. We don't see everything that goes into an athlete's training-the running, the weightlifting, the soreness. Flowrestling has a video of the USA men's freestyle team running up the cog, an abandoned railroad track in the mountains near Colorado Springs. They run two-minute sprints, straight up a mountain in thin air. Terry Brands, the team's coach, calls it a mind-numbing workout, and I could not think of a better way to describe it.

Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Ludacris together at Friday night's USA basketball exhibition game ...

Oh, how I wish I could have listened to that conversation ...

Meanwhile, what is going on with Buffett's shirt? Neon green? Lizards? You would think with all the money he has, he could have at least worn something a little cooler ...

Put your best caption ideas down below ...

This commercial is cracking me. It has everything ... cartoons, pandas, cowboys, and LeBron James speaking Chinese ...

The Beijing Olympics have been billed in some circles as the "Hi-Tech Olympics." After reading this story from the Sydney Morning Herald though, it seems as if organizers might want to pick another slogan ...

"Journalists from international publications protested about internet speeds "10 times slower than at the Sydney Olympic Games eight years ago" and the apparent censorship of websites, especially those from other news organisations."

I can't stand it when I have a slow Internet connection. If I had been sitting there for ten minutes and then found out that the site was already blocked ... I would have pulled my hair out.

The Chinese, of course, tried to play it off like nothing was wrong ...

BOCOG media director Sun Weijia initially said the problem lay with the journalist, and claimed all websites and pages were available. "There is no problem or issues," he said. But when confronted by a large gathering of Western media all making the same complaint, he said: "I will look into

When the Chinese gymnastics team was announced Friday, there was an international debate over the ages of two members - He Kexin and Jiang YuYuan. It was suggested that the two were under 16, which would make them ineligible for the Games. But The New York Times reports that Chinese officials provided passports which support their claim that Kexin and YuYuan are of the proper age to compete.

Oh! The CHINESE officials provided passports? Well, I guess you can close the book on that one.

He Kexin is a girl, by the way. It took me five minutes to figure that out because The Times article referred to her by her first name, "He", making for sentences like this:

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