1 Once upon a time, as a young theatre grad student, I was helping carry a chunk of platform (4'x8', with 2x4 stringers) out of the department's warehouse.  I was walking backwards... and took one step too many.

When I gathered my wits (both of them) about me, I realized that 1) I had fallen about 48 inches straight down, and 2) my right foot was pointing the wrong way, and I had a cantaloupe attached to the side of my ankle... and it was getting bigger and turning the most incredible colors.

When they got me into the emergency room, they x-rayed the thing.  The doc walked in with the exposure, held it up to the light, and said "Look!  Confetti!"

Ligaments shredded like cole slaw, tendons snapped, but no broken ankle.  I was in a soft cast and crutches for almost six months, a hard brace and a cane for another six.  If I had broken the darn thing, I'd've been healed in six-to-eight weeks, tops.

Mind you, this was in Minnesota... in March.  The day it happened, it was 74 and sunny.  Three days later, we got eight inches of snow, and the highs were in the teens... and I had to walk five blocks from my parking spot to the theatre building.  On crutches.  Made it half-way there before one of the crutches hit a patch of ice. 

When I instinctively put my (damaged) foot down to catch myself... well, I was later told that my scream was heard a mile away. 

To this day, almost 20 years later, my ankle gives me problems.  I can sprain it by sneezing hard, for example...

2 Ow.

3

I've only done serious violence to my body once. When I was a sophomore in high school, I broke the radius and ulna in my right arm. They were clean breaks, about 4 inches from my wrist.

Oddly enough, I didn't feel any pain. It was at an after-school choir practice, and we were taking a break. Some of us were playing keep-away out in the yard. I had the ball, someone charged me, I threw it and lost my balance and landed on my hands. The right arm broke.

Even though it was just a game, I figure I must have been wired up enough so that my "fight-or-flight" system kicked in. So instead of pain, it just went numb. I could easily see that something was badly wrong, so I gripped it with my left hand and went inside and showed it to the choir director. Ended up having to spend a night in the hospital before they set it. Six weeks in a cast, and I've never had any problems with it since. There's no visible sign that anything happened.

Broken bones are vastly preferable to ligament or tendon or cartilage injuries.

4 I have to say that, at the time, the ankle really didn't hurt that much.  Some, sure, but the time I was hit in the face by a helicoptering 2x4 (I was arc-welding, stood and flipped up my full-face shield, just as the football player who was taking a scene shop class for a required credit, and who was carrying a few 2x4s, turned.  Thwack.  If I had left the face shield down... afterwards, he helped me stanch the bleeding from my crunchy nose; he'd had 'four or five' broken noses, he said, and had a lot of practice) hurt a lot worse. 

I was actually more disoriented from falling four feet unexpectedly than in pain.  I may have clipped my chin on the platform as I went down, too.

LATER, though, the ankle hurt like a sunuvagun.

5

It's an evolutionary thing. The purpose of pain is to prevent us from using a damaged part of our body, potentially making the damage worse.

But in a fight-or-flight situation, that pain could immobilize us long enough for a leopard to kill us. So when the sympathetic nervous system is active, then sometimes in response to injuries the pituitary will flood the body with endorphins, natural opiates, to suppress the pain. True, that means you might make the injury worse. But evolutionarily speaking that's still superior to being eaten by a leopard.

Later, after you slow down, and the sympathetic nervous system is shut down, then the endorphins fade back and the injury will hurt if you mistreat it.

My arm started hurting about two hours after I broke it, but it never hurt much. Certainly not like you'd have expected it to if you had seen what it looked like.

It isn't always obvious what will turn the sympathetic nervous system on. In my case, apparently a game of keepaway was close enough to combat for my body.

6 What Pixy said.

7 Man, worse I've ever had was a sprained ankle.  Mr. Duck's story made hurt just reading his post.

But anyway, I was just gonna mention that as for the Chinese team, there is at least one 15 year old as the Olympic rules state that the player's 16th birthday must be the year of the event (sorry, no link, but I think I was clicking through Drudge), so they don't actually have to be 16 exactly.  Kid's 16th birthday could be December 31st of this year, well after the games, but she'd still be eligible.

Personally, unless some of those girls are just petite, some of them look about 12 years old.