One would think no one could really claim to have invented jumping and tumbling, but my favorite reading material in Beijing, the English-language China Daily, says otherwise.

Referring to China’s victory in the women’s gymnastics team event on Wednesday, someone named Patrick Whiteley wrote, “The Chinese girls, for the first time in Olympic history, could sense a team victory in this acrobatic sport, which was invented by their ancestors more than 1,000 years ago.”

(Emphasis added.)

Uhhh, OK.

I guess nobody thought about tumbling until the Chinese did, more than 1,000 years ago.

I suppose we can ignore all that pottery from the ancient Mediterranean, more than 2,000 years old, of dare-devils vaulting over the backs of bulls. That wasn’t gymnastics or anything like it.

Did the Chinese codify all this, 1,000 years ago? Did they conduct championships? Is that how they make the “invented gymnastics” claim?

Actually, it’s funny (and telling) how many countries claim to have invented so many of the same things. I have a friend in Italy who believes Italy did basically everything first — and I’m just now discovering it actually was the Chinese.

The Italian’s mother said, when the Americans landed on the moon in 1969, “she was surprised that there weren’t Italians already there.”

Anyway, China seems to have a really bad case of “we did it first.”