vmars314's review against another edition
5.0
This book was originally published in 1995, but I think is still relevant today. It is amazing and so incredibly sad what can and does happen behind the scenes when everyone's focus is on winning medals.
600bars's review against another edition
4.0
Joan Ryan paints a pretty damning picture of elite gymnastics training, and a damning portrait of Bela Karolyi in particular. (Figure skating is given equal billing on the cover, but the breakdown is like 80/20 and even then much of the figure skating part is just rehashing the Tonya Harding situation. Skaters deserve their own book! For this reason I kinda ignored skaters in this review). The training amounts to child abuse at the hands of coaches, sports officials, and insane parents. The children are verbally, emotionally, and physically abused by their coaches. This was written many years before the Nassar scandal broke, but it’s clear that the situation is ripe for sexual abuse– there are parents signing custody over to coaches in order to give their kid a shot at the Olympics, or parents who will look the other way as long as their child wins. The preferred age of athletes skews younger and younger creating a huge amount of pressure on athletes to stay “forever young” and starve themselves to prevent puberty, causing severe eating disorders and extreme damage on bone development, which leads to fragile bones that then fracture while doing all the intense flips and movements. Unsafe training and insufficient recovery time for injuries result in further injuries, and even, in the heart wrenching case of Julissa Gomez, death. The deduction based scoring system exacerbates the need for Perfection rather than achievement, and the athletes must navigate petty politics rather than a simple win/loss. (not that other sports don’t also have politics, but there is much more subjectivity in the scoring for gymnastics and skating than scoring a goal which either happens or it doesn’t). As if all this isn’t horrific enough, Ryan points out the ways in which “feminine” sports like gymnastics and figure skating enshrine an idealized traditional femininity of grace, youth and sparkles that is untainted by the “lesbianism” of other female sports (I chuckled at the way she said that, but she’s not wrong. Women’s sports get very little attention unless they are the girly sports. And sports in general are one of the only arenas these days that is explicitly gender segregated, which is its own can of worms). The big question in the book is whether the ends justify the means– And it’s pretty clear where Ryan’s opinion lies. We sacrifice these athlete’s childhoods, and even the whole rest of their lives, as well in order to make champions. Ryan is calling for stronger regulations on coaches and labor laws for child athletes. There are rules about how much child actors can do (and readers of McCurdy’s recent memoir will know that even those are not enough to curb the abuses in that industry) and yet there are no laws about how much a child athlete can train.
A problem with the training methods on display in this book, aside from the obvious inherent cruelty, is that it’s very effective. “Before Bela Karolyi imported his training system in 1981, the best showing by the U.S. Women in a world championship was Marcia Frederick’s gold medal on the uneven bars in 1978.” (203). We got a bronze medal at the olympics in 1948, and then nothing at the olympics until 1984. At the time of the book’s publication, which was 1995, USA women had gotten 13 individual medals and 2 team medals at the Olympics. That’s a pretty drastic shift. We’ve gotten a medal in literally every single year except 1988. And since this book came out, the USA team has continued to dominate: we won gold for best all-around 5 olympics in a row from 2004-2020. (Karoyli’s wife Marta Karolyi was the team coordinator for the olympic team from 2001-2016). We won gold at the last 6 worlds. So obviously the plan fucking worked, but at what cost. Many interviewees wonder if it is possible to have such good results without resorting to these tactics. However, things are (slightly) better now for gymnasts than they were when this was written, and team USA is still doing amazing, so I think that proves we don’t NEED to do all this to win.
The cost has been even higher than the book says. The book glosses over sexual abuse, not because the author doesn’t think its important, she is very clear that the structure and environment are ripe for all kinds of abuse and sexual abuse is no exception. But to make strong claims requires someone to come forward which hadn’t happened at the time of this book. Since then USA gymnastics has been scarred by the Larry Nassar scandal. I should watch the documentary about it before finishing this review, but I haven’t seen it yet. It does seem like things are changing/have changed, especially after the Nassar scandal. I mean Simone Biles chose not to participate in the team final in Japan 2021 due to feeling overwhelmed by pressure. From what I read in this book, it seems like that would have been unheard of in years past. They would’ve forced her to go out there even if her leg was broken; I'm sure if she complained of anxiety or feeling overwhelmed they would have simply laughed.
I’m still circling around the end justifying the means regarding an artist sacrificing themself for art in many situations. When I watched the Amy Winehouse documentary I cried and felt personally responsible for contributing to her death because I was a fan, and I wondered if it was worth it to have her music as a gift to the world at the price of destroying her life. I felt similarly when I read Jeannete McCurdy’s memoir about child actors. When you really think about it, there are so many things that make the world great to live in like music and art and sports, that require horrible amounts of suffering to achieve, and I always wonder if it is worth it or not. But for every example of a Britney Spears who was destroyed by being a child star, there’s a Hilary Duff who seems fine. It’s definitely possible to make it so talented people, especially children, are not totally exploited in order to get the end product, yet it happens over and over again. Idk maybe it is not possible and it’s inherently exploitative to have any child star at all, be it athlete singer actor or youtube star.
For most prodigies there’s really no rush to be a *star*. If your kid likes singing, there’s no reason they can’t pursue it later in life on their own after a normal childhood. They can just sing the solo in their school choir. There’s no reason a child can’t take piano lessons all their childhood and then become a virtuoso when they’re older. The problem with gymnastics and other similar activities like ballet is that you really HAVE to manipulate your body so it grows differently than it would otherwise. For gymnastics there isn’t really a late career, most gymnasts have already reached the pinnacle of their career BEFORE they even get to college. If you want to be a star, your parents have to decide that for you before you’re like 9 years old. And I know that there is a slight mythical aspect to this, because we have a youth-obsessed culture that loves prodigies and thinks you die when you hit 30. There are other situations where people start later in life and are still able to reach a very high level. It’s not uncommon to be in ballet class and all the girls started when they were 3 but the boys started as teens because of the social pressures dissuading boys from dance. I train in pole dance, which people don’t start until later in life because of the sexual connotation, no parents are putting their toddler in pole dance class. Most of the teachers and competitors at my studio definitely have a dance/gymnastics/circus background, sure, but there are a few who never did and are still able to perform at a very high level despite not starting until they were in their 20s. So these two things make me wonder if it is true that you actually HAVE to start training as a very young child to reach an elite level. But still, there are certain skills I have that are easy as pie because I learned them as a child and then never forgot them, things that would take me months and months to achieve if I learned them now even with identical levels of fitness. It’s similar to the ease of learning a language as a kid vs as an adult. Your brain is like a sponge and you’re not afraid of being upside down. Even if you don’t do your activity for years and years it is SO much easier to get it back if you already have the muscle memory.
Much of this book is about the horrendous body standards that were prevalent at this time in gymnastics, causing girls to starve themselves in an effort to reach an impossible goal. The ideal gymnast body has gone through a number of changes over the years, and in the time this book was written the situation was at its worst. In the early history of gymnastics they had long balletic figures. As the sport got more extreme, the flips became so difficult to execute that they were easier on a physically small, childlike body that didn’t have hip development changing the center of gravity. So athletes got younger and younger and smaller and smaller. This created an immense amount of pressure on the girls, not only to stay thin, but to race against time. Because there were minimum age requirements, but the girls were at their prime before puberty and growth spurts set in, there was only a very very small window where someone could become a champion. You had literally like 4 years tops, and your body could betray you by going through puberty at any second.
Thankfully, the ultra thin childlike physique is no longer the gymnast ideal. I read this article from 2016 discussing why. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ezeva7/why-olympic-gymnasts-dont-have-to-be-super-skinny-anymore
There are two strategies to fling yourself all about the way these athletes do: you can be extremely light and tiny, or you can become so strong and powerful you’re like a little missile and can rocket yourself into the flips. The extremes in body type skewing younger and tinier are borne out by the data. In 1956 the top 2 olympic gymnasts were 35 & 21 years old. In 1968 the average age of the team was 26 years old, 5’3, 121 lb. In 1976, not 10 years later, the average age was 17.5, 5’3, 106 lbs. By 1992, the AVERAGE age was 16, height 4’9, weight just 83 pounds. This is extremely drastic. I wanted to see if there was proof in the numbers that things have changed for the better. I found a table of age, height and weight for the 2016 team and found that the average age was 20, height was a little over 5 feet, and weight was 107.8. The average age is up 4 years, the average height up 3 inches, and the the average weight has gone up by 24.8 pounds. That is almost a 30% increase in weight. If you took the average of the 1992 team the BMI is decidedly underweight while the 2016 team is in the “healthy” range. While I know that BMI has limitations as a metric etc etc, you can clearly see from the numbers that the sport is moving away from a body that is malnourished and childlike to a body that is strong and, most importantly, not literally killing the owner of said body.
The whole time I was reading this I thought about Castrati. Castrati were male singers who were castrated before puberty so that their voice would never drop. They would grow the lungs of an adult and therefore have a very high voice but with the strength and control of an adult voice. In exchange for the beautiful and unique singing voice (which also had religious purposes, I think women couldn’t be in certain church spaces/events but someone still needs to sing the high parts, idk I’m not an expert on castrati lore), the castrati had their bodies mutilated, the possibility of fertility foreclosed, and social ostracization in the rest of their life. This seems barbaric and like way too high of a price to pay just for singing. And yet we regularly do the same thing for elite sports: this may seem like an extreme comparison, but the girls in the book experience extreme physical injury up to and including paralysis and death. They train so hard that they are in amenorrhea (they don’t menstruate due to lack of body fat and extreme physical duress). Being in amenorrhea causes athletes to lose bone density at the rate of a postmenopausal woman. Once your bone density is gone, you can’t get it back, and you’ll be more susceptible to fractures the rest of your life.
This is why I find the arguments against trans kids accessing puberty blockers so disingenuous. There’s all this bullshit rhetoric about “protecting the children from mutilating themselves because they're too young to have bodily autonomy” and yet no one bats an eye at the fact that sports and dance are forever changing millions of children’s skeletons and future fertility. Many athletes, even high school athletes/dancers who will never be olympians or professional dancers, train hard enough that they don’t get their periods or severely stunt their growth. Why is it okay do decide for a kindergartner that they’ll become an athlete to irrevocably change and even damage their bodies for the hopes of getting a medal (which only one in thousands will ever achieve), and yet everyone freaks out if a teenager wants to change their OWN body so that they don’t wanna kill themselves? It just proves that the argument is rooted in bigotry and not actually coming from a place of caring about the health and wellbeing of children, because if it were, then they’d also be railing against the fact that millions and millions of kids,/teens (way more than the amount of kids seeking puberty blockers), who will never be professional athletes, train hard enough to damage their physical and mental wellbeing with permanent effects.
Sometimes I wish I had had a much more intense training as a child because I wish I was better at dance/circus/gymnastics/whatever. But at the same time, many people I know who danced much more intensely than I did have a really bad relationship with it, while for me my dance classes are like my favorite two hours of the week. Maybe if I had done it more I would be burned out and not able to enjoy it as an adult. And I can certainly point to very toxic and damaging things about it. But still I regularly think to myself that one of the best things my parents ever did for me was put me in dance at age 3. *Long personal rant about why I am so thankful for this that stays in google docs* . It’s certainly possible to learn new tricks as an adult, but it’s soooo much easier when you’re a kid to learn how to do flips and tricks because you’re not as afraid of throwing yourself around. I loved going to dance and gymnastics so much as a child and I am still thankful for the positive relationship I have with movement in general. So while I sometimes wish I had had more training, I read something like this and am glad it was not that serious.
All of this is so horrific that you might come away thinking we need to ban all children from sports forever. Ryan writes with an impassioned voice bordering on melodramatic at points. I was also clutching my pearls as well the whole time I was reading this, thinking that we need to abolish gymnastics and children’s athletics altogether and that this is literal child abuse etc etc. But then I go on all the girl’s instagrams and they’re adults now (some of the girls are so young in the 90s that they’re still not very old yet and it’s wild that they retired at 18 years old or whatever) and still love gymnastics and it looks so awesome and I wish I could walk on my hands and flip around and wowwww I just go starry eyed. I went to the Gold Over America tour of the USA gymnastics team and it was so inspiring I spent weeks cartwheeling around the house. It’s extremely depressing as a fan to know that things are so bad for athletes, and hard to reconcile the joy of gymnastics with the horrors in this book.
One of my hot takes is that we need a natty and a juiced olympics/all sporting events. Why not see how far the human body can go. And there’s a fine line between “performance enhancing drugs” and any of the other things athletes do to get ahead like train at high altitude or oxygen chambers. I think there is value in seeing the limit of what the human body can achieve and that there’s suspiciously selective hand wringing over the “health” of other people’s bodies. I respect the fact that people do insane shit with their own bodies like iron man triathlons or body building, which is overall horrible for your health. The problem with gymnastics is that the athletes are primarily children with very little agency, and the structure and culture of elite training is conducive to abuse if not abusive itself. I think it is possible to still have a thriving champion gymnastics team while treating the gymnasts like human beings rather than flipping robots. I hope the sport continues to evolve in a positive direction, both technically and in the way it treats its athletes.
A problem with the training methods on display in this book, aside from the obvious inherent cruelty, is that it’s very effective. “Before Bela Karolyi imported his training system in 1981, the best showing by the U.S. Women in a world championship was Marcia Frederick’s gold medal on the uneven bars in 1978.” (203). We got a bronze medal at the olympics in 1948, and then nothing at the olympics until 1984. At the time of the book’s publication, which was 1995, USA women had gotten 13 individual medals and 2 team medals at the Olympics. That’s a pretty drastic shift. We’ve gotten a medal in literally every single year except 1988. And since this book came out, the USA team has continued to dominate: we won gold for best all-around 5 olympics in a row from 2004-2020. (Karoyli’s wife Marta Karolyi was the team coordinator for the olympic team from 2001-2016). We won gold at the last 6 worlds. So obviously the plan fucking worked, but at what cost. Many interviewees wonder if it is possible to have such good results without resorting to these tactics. However, things are (slightly) better now for gymnasts than they were when this was written, and team USA is still doing amazing, so I think that proves we don’t NEED to do all this to win.
The cost has been even higher than the book says. The book glosses over sexual abuse, not because the author doesn’t think its important, she is very clear that the structure and environment are ripe for all kinds of abuse and sexual abuse is no exception. But to make strong claims requires someone to come forward which hadn’t happened at the time of this book. Since then USA gymnastics has been scarred by the Larry Nassar scandal. I should watch the documentary about it before finishing this review, but I haven’t seen it yet. It does seem like things are changing/have changed, especially after the Nassar scandal. I mean Simone Biles chose not to participate in the team final in Japan 2021 due to feeling overwhelmed by pressure. From what I read in this book, it seems like that would have been unheard of in years past. They would’ve forced her to go out there even if her leg was broken; I'm sure if she complained of anxiety or feeling overwhelmed they would have simply laughed.
I’m still circling around the end justifying the means regarding an artist sacrificing themself for art in many situations. When I watched the Amy Winehouse documentary I cried and felt personally responsible for contributing to her death because I was a fan, and I wondered if it was worth it to have her music as a gift to the world at the price of destroying her life. I felt similarly when I read Jeannete McCurdy’s memoir about child actors. When you really think about it, there are so many things that make the world great to live in like music and art and sports, that require horrible amounts of suffering to achieve, and I always wonder if it is worth it or not. But for every example of a Britney Spears who was destroyed by being a child star, there’s a Hilary Duff who seems fine. It’s definitely possible to make it so talented people, especially children, are not totally exploited in order to get the end product, yet it happens over and over again. Idk maybe it is not possible and it’s inherently exploitative to have any child star at all, be it athlete singer actor or youtube star.
For most prodigies there’s really no rush to be a *star*. If your kid likes singing, there’s no reason they can’t pursue it later in life on their own after a normal childhood. They can just sing the solo in their school choir. There’s no reason a child can’t take piano lessons all their childhood and then become a virtuoso when they’re older. The problem with gymnastics and other similar activities like ballet is that you really HAVE to manipulate your body so it grows differently than it would otherwise. For gymnastics there isn’t really a late career, most gymnasts have already reached the pinnacle of their career BEFORE they even get to college. If you want to be a star, your parents have to decide that for you before you’re like 9 years old. And I know that there is a slight mythical aspect to this, because we have a youth-obsessed culture that loves prodigies and thinks you die when you hit 30. There are other situations where people start later in life and are still able to reach a very high level. It’s not uncommon to be in ballet class and all the girls started when they were 3 but the boys started as teens because of the social pressures dissuading boys from dance. I train in pole dance, which people don’t start until later in life because of the sexual connotation, no parents are putting their toddler in pole dance class. Most of the teachers and competitors at my studio definitely have a dance/gymnastics/circus background, sure, but there are a few who never did and are still able to perform at a very high level despite not starting until they were in their 20s. So these two things make me wonder if it is true that you actually HAVE to start training as a very young child to reach an elite level. But still, there are certain skills I have that are easy as pie because I learned them as a child and then never forgot them, things that would take me months and months to achieve if I learned them now even with identical levels of fitness. It’s similar to the ease of learning a language as a kid vs as an adult. Your brain is like a sponge and you’re not afraid of being upside down. Even if you don’t do your activity for years and years it is SO much easier to get it back if you already have the muscle memory.
Much of this book is about the horrendous body standards that were prevalent at this time in gymnastics, causing girls to starve themselves in an effort to reach an impossible goal. The ideal gymnast body has gone through a number of changes over the years, and in the time this book was written the situation was at its worst. In the early history of gymnastics they had long balletic figures. As the sport got more extreme, the flips became so difficult to execute that they were easier on a physically small, childlike body that didn’t have hip development changing the center of gravity. So athletes got younger and younger and smaller and smaller. This created an immense amount of pressure on the girls, not only to stay thin, but to race against time. Because there were minimum age requirements, but the girls were at their prime before puberty and growth spurts set in, there was only a very very small window where someone could become a champion. You had literally like 4 years tops, and your body could betray you by going through puberty at any second.
Thankfully, the ultra thin childlike physique is no longer the gymnast ideal. I read this article from 2016 discussing why. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ezeva7/why-olympic-gymnasts-dont-have-to-be-super-skinny-anymore
There are two strategies to fling yourself all about the way these athletes do: you can be extremely light and tiny, or you can become so strong and powerful you’re like a little missile and can rocket yourself into the flips. The extremes in body type skewing younger and tinier are borne out by the data. In 1956 the top 2 olympic gymnasts were 35 & 21 years old. In 1968 the average age of the team was 26 years old, 5’3, 121 lb. In 1976, not 10 years later, the average age was 17.5, 5’3, 106 lbs. By 1992, the AVERAGE age was 16, height 4’9, weight just 83 pounds. This is extremely drastic. I wanted to see if there was proof in the numbers that things have changed for the better. I found a table of age, height and weight for the 2016 team and found that the average age was 20, height was a little over 5 feet, and weight was 107.8. The average age is up 4 years, the average height up 3 inches, and the the average weight has gone up by 24.8 pounds. That is almost a 30% increase in weight. If you took the average of the 1992 team the BMI is decidedly underweight while the 2016 team is in the “healthy” range. While I know that BMI has limitations as a metric etc etc, you can clearly see from the numbers that the sport is moving away from a body that is malnourished and childlike to a body that is strong and, most importantly, not literally killing the owner of said body.
The whole time I was reading this I thought about Castrati. Castrati were male singers who were castrated before puberty so that their voice would never drop. They would grow the lungs of an adult and therefore have a very high voice but with the strength and control of an adult voice. In exchange for the beautiful and unique singing voice (which also had religious purposes, I think women couldn’t be in certain church spaces/events but someone still needs to sing the high parts, idk I’m not an expert on castrati lore), the castrati had their bodies mutilated, the possibility of fertility foreclosed, and social ostracization in the rest of their life. This seems barbaric and like way too high of a price to pay just for singing. And yet we regularly do the same thing for elite sports: this may seem like an extreme comparison, but the girls in the book experience extreme physical injury up to and including paralysis and death. They train so hard that they are in amenorrhea (they don’t menstruate due to lack of body fat and extreme physical duress). Being in amenorrhea causes athletes to lose bone density at the rate of a postmenopausal woman. Once your bone density is gone, you can’t get it back, and you’ll be more susceptible to fractures the rest of your life.
This is why I find the arguments against trans kids accessing puberty blockers so disingenuous. There’s all this bullshit rhetoric about “protecting the children from mutilating themselves because they're too young to have bodily autonomy” and yet no one bats an eye at the fact that sports and dance are forever changing millions of children’s skeletons and future fertility. Many athletes, even high school athletes/dancers who will never be olympians or professional dancers, train hard enough that they don’t get their periods or severely stunt their growth. Why is it okay do decide for a kindergartner that they’ll become an athlete to irrevocably change and even damage their bodies for the hopes of getting a medal (which only one in thousands will ever achieve), and yet everyone freaks out if a teenager wants to change their OWN body so that they don’t wanna kill themselves? It just proves that the argument is rooted in bigotry and not actually coming from a place of caring about the health and wellbeing of children, because if it were, then they’d also be railing against the fact that millions and millions of kids,/teens (way more than the amount of kids seeking puberty blockers), who will never be professional athletes, train hard enough to damage their physical and mental wellbeing with permanent effects.
Sometimes I wish I had had a much more intense training as a child because I wish I was better at dance/circus/gymnastics/whatever. But at the same time, many people I know who danced much more intensely than I did have a really bad relationship with it, while for me my dance classes are like my favorite two hours of the week. Maybe if I had done it more I would be burned out and not able to enjoy it as an adult. And I can certainly point to very toxic and damaging things about it. But still I regularly think to myself that one of the best things my parents ever did for me was put me in dance at age 3. *Long personal rant about why I am so thankful for this that stays in google docs* . It’s certainly possible to learn new tricks as an adult, but it’s soooo much easier when you’re a kid to learn how to do flips and tricks because you’re not as afraid of throwing yourself around. I loved going to dance and gymnastics so much as a child and I am still thankful for the positive relationship I have with movement in general. So while I sometimes wish I had had more training, I read something like this and am glad it was not that serious.
All of this is so horrific that you might come away thinking we need to ban all children from sports forever. Ryan writes with an impassioned voice bordering on melodramatic at points. I was also clutching my pearls as well the whole time I was reading this, thinking that we need to abolish gymnastics and children’s athletics altogether and that this is literal child abuse etc etc. But then I go on all the girl’s instagrams and they’re adults now (some of the girls are so young in the 90s that they’re still not very old yet and it’s wild that they retired at 18 years old or whatever) and still love gymnastics and it looks so awesome and I wish I could walk on my hands and flip around and wowwww I just go starry eyed. I went to the Gold Over America tour of the USA gymnastics team and it was so inspiring I spent weeks cartwheeling around the house. It’s extremely depressing as a fan to know that things are so bad for athletes, and hard to reconcile the joy of gymnastics with the horrors in this book.
One of my hot takes is that we need a natty and a juiced olympics/all sporting events. Why not see how far the human body can go. And there’s a fine line between “performance enhancing drugs” and any of the other things athletes do to get ahead like train at high altitude or oxygen chambers. I think there is value in seeing the limit of what the human body can achieve and that there’s suspiciously selective hand wringing over the “health” of other people’s bodies. I respect the fact that people do insane shit with their own bodies like iron man triathlons or body building, which is overall horrible for your health. The problem with gymnastics is that the athletes are primarily children with very little agency, and the structure and culture of elite training is conducive to abuse if not abusive itself. I think it is possible to still have a thriving champion gymnastics team while treating the gymnasts like human beings rather than flipping robots. I hope the sport continues to evolve in a positive direction, both technically and in the way it treats its athletes.
mcsangel2's review against another edition
3.0
Really hard to read...like literally, some of the descriptions of the injuries were really graphic. And sadly, the only thing that has changed in the 27 years since this book came out is 1) skating has changed their judging system from 6.0 to IJS, and 2) Gymnasts now have to be at least 16 to compete at the Olympics. (And as I write this, skating is going through another Olympic scandal, so we can expect them to raise the age to 16 going forward as well).
katiepoo456's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.75