Sang Lan exercises at a hospital in Beijing in 1999, one year after her accident.

AP / GREG BAKER

BEIJING Sang Lan rolled her wheelchair to a spot overlooking the vault, her broken, withered body dressed in jeans and a red shirt. Several Chinese boys she once knew performed on the floor below, men now, tumbling and spinning to a gold medal in Olympic team gymnastics. Sang cheered and bumped one hand into the other, her fingers permanently closed into loose fists.

Ten years ago, she was a 17-year-old competing at the Goodwill Games in New York. During a routine warm-up vault, Sang landed on her head and suffered a spinal injury that left her paralyzed from the chest down. A decade later, she is a college graduate and media figure, a symbol both of gymnastics’ inherent danger and of spirited resilience in the face of catastrophic disability.

“I don’t feel anything bad,” Sang said in an interview, explaining that she still follows gymnastics and may provide television or Internet commentary during the Olympics. “I learned to face reality from the beginning. Sometimes, when I watch old videos of me flying in gymnastics, I’m proud that I used to be so good.”

In her dreams, she does not see herself as a national champion vaulter, which she was, but as a mischievous prankster avoiding dietary restrictions with her friends at sports school.

“The little cozy things we did together,” Sang said, speaking through an interpreter, laughing at the story. “They were doing weight control and we snuck out to buy snacks.”

The women’s Olympic team final played out last week in muffled scandal. Online records listing Chinese gymnasts and their ages, posted on official Web sites in China and given in the Chinese media, indicate that two female gymnasts — He Kexin and Jiang Yuyuan — may both be 14, not 16, the minimum age required for Olympic eligibility.

Another Chinese gymnast, Yang Yun, has admitted on state-run television that she was only 14 when she won a pair of bronze medals at the 2000 Sydney Games.

The Chinese gymnastics federation has produced passports for He and Jiang, indicating they are both 16. The International Olympic Committee and the World Gymnastics Federation seem to be performing see-no-evil backflips to avoid confronting China on the Yang case. Other nations hesitate to complain, fearful that retaliatory judges will mark their athletes down, like day-old bread.

“You can’t lie to the IOC,” Sang said. “You have to be truthful.”

Then she chose diplomacy over accusation.

“Asian girls are smaller than American girls,” Sang said.

There was no equivocating on her belief that women’s gymnastics is becoming too dangerous, overly dependent on tricks instead of artistry. It is not a new claim. Alarm bells have long sounded about abusive, injurious treatment of young girls in the sport.

“I understand the unquenchable craving for gold medals,” Sang said. “I am against this trend. The sport should be the embodiment of beauty and harmony of the human body. We should bring pleasure and beauty to the audience, not just, ‘Oh, they are doing another difficult trick.’ ”

Safety-related changes have been made in the vault after a handful of paralyzing injuries. The vaulting horse, once a pommel horse turned sideways for women, now resembles a cushiony potato chip. But the changes have come too late for Sang.

As she made her runway sprint at those fateful Goodwill Games, a coach moved the springboard in a misguided attempt to assist her, Sang said. She was running at full speed; there was no time to stop and no spotter to cushion her fall.

“I heard a bad sound,” Octavian Belu, the Romanian national coach, said at the time. “A crack.”

During 10 months of rehabilitation in the United States, Sang drew the attention of political and celebrity figures for her courage and upbeat nature. She assisted then New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in lowering the ball in Times Square on New Year’s Eve 1999. Leonardo DiCaprio left his home address. Celine Dion later sent a concert invitation.

“Knowing her own prognosis, she showed nothing but courage and exceptional spirit,” Dr. Kristjan T. Ragnarsson, who treated Sang at Mount Sinai Medical Center, told the Associated Press last year. “In contrast to many people with such devastating injuries, I can’t recall that she ever appeared depressed, angry or blamed anybody or anything for her injury.”

Of course, there have been dark moments. Frustration complicates the simplest task. Sang cannot hold a cup, pick up a pen, grab a pill out of a bottle, dress herself. To type on a computer keyboard, she must use small sticks attached to her hands.

At Peking University, where Sang graduated last year with a broadcasting degree, friends had to carry her up stairs from class to class. She tried to take notes with a large pen, but it fell away when her hand began to spasm. A caretaker looks after her, along with a personal assistant, or manager, provided by China’s General Sports Administration.

“I can’t say I never regret, but I never complain,” Sang said. “There’s no use in being regretful. You can’t do your life over again. I still have a deep affection for sport.”