I've spent the last month or so reading through a lot of gymnastics literature. While a majority of it includes tables and graphs demonstrating biomechanics, scoring systems, or aesthetic instruction the most impactful book includes none of these. The book "Little Girls In Pretty Boxes" by Joan Ryan is a heartwrenching look into the horrors of the sports of gymnastics and figure skating. I have only read one other book that compares to how difficult it was to read this book (A Child Called It), yet this still tops the list. As a gymnastics coach and former competitor I have seen first hand the physical and emotional abuse that can be present in the sport. I have personally witnessed coaches verbally demeaning girls as young as seven, telling them that they are not good enough or that they are wimps and sissys for not working through the pain of injury. I have heard parents and students confide in me about coaches going against the warnings of doctors and their own bodies... yet never confront the coaches. I have seen gymnasts including myself quietly leave gyms because we can't deal with the coaches anymore without ever telling them off or letting them know the damage they cause. While I have never had a coach like Karolyi the similarities are haunting.
It was so refreshing to see Shawn Johnson compete. She enjoys her sport, she didn't drop out of school, she smiles. So many competitors gave up on life long ago. The sport is not for their enjoyment but for the enjoyment of their parents, coaches, and America. The empty looks on competitors faces and dissapointment at getting less than gold. I went to the level 5 state meet this fall. The meet is for girls ages 7-14+ most of who are 8 and 9 years old competeting for their second or third year. This student showed incredible talent with first place scores on vault and bars (9.925 on bars, the highest in the nation for her level this year), second place on beam, and sixth place on floor with a 9.050 (only .425 behind first). After the awards ceremony I heard her coach talking to her mom not about the incredible feet that she had obtained with a second all around score and the highest bars score I have ever seen in my life but about how they really need to work on her floor routine... no one is ever good enough.
Here are some of the excerpts from the book that I found most impactful:
"And after Julissa joined Karolyi's, she was always in pain, first from a stress fracture in her ankle, then shinsplints, then hamstring pulls and finally a sprained knee that would eventually drive her from Karolyi's for good. Karolyi, like a lion circling hobbled prey, picked on her, testing her survival isntincts. Either she would grow stronger from his abuse or she would quit. Karolyi needed to know which it would be. In or out. Black or white. Yes or no. He had no time for doubts, hesitations or fears... 'He called [Julissa] stupid all the time,' says Chelle. 'Then he didn't really pay much attention to her at all. She didn't get the hard-core coaching.' No mater what ugly words the coaches threw at her, Julissa didn't fight back. Few do. A gymnast at the elite level learns to stand still--mouth closed, eyes blank--and weather her coache's storms. A gymnast is seen and not heard. Even when she's in pain, she says nothing until she can no longer work. Nadia Comaneci once cut her hand on the plastic-and-foam hand guards the gymnasts wear to perform ont eh uneven bars, and by the time she told anyone, she had blood poisoning up her arm. Even when she's scared, the gymnats says nothing. Especially when she's scared. 'Chickening out' before a trick is an unforgivable sin." ~ Julissa died competing a vault that she was never confident on that her coach insisted she perform.
"Parents have always lived through their children to some extent, but these live in fear their daughters will be expelled form the gym, so they say nothing when coaches belittle their children or push them too hard. 'We should as parents be able to make sure they're treated porperly, I guess, but everybody's afraid to do it,' says another Karolui mother, Chris Fortsen. 'I guess I wasn't a very good mother, because I just kind of took it.'"
"Few parents learn from those who have gone before; the girls' careers are too short. By the time parents realize their mistakes, their daughters have retired, the parents themselves have moved on and new parents have come in to play out the same old script. 'I would never do it again,' says Laura Irvin, mother of another Karolyi gymnast. 'When my daughter said she'd never let her own daughter do gymnastics, I felt like a failure. All we wanted was a perfect life for her.'"
"Of the two hundred or so gymnasts who compete on the elite level every year, only twenty make the national team. Only six compete in the Olympics. A gymnast's elite career usually lasts five or six years, generally from age twelve to age eighteen. Some go on to college gymnastics, a more forgiving environment. Others walk out of the gym and never return. How many leave because of injuries or eating disorders? No one keeps a tally. But at the highest level few quit simply because they have lost interest, as a child might quit violin lessons. 'Gymnasts don't so much retire as expire.'"
"Two cherished American values came crashing against each other in the debate over Karolyi: the protection of our children versus our will to win. 'We have to figure out what our goals are,' says Olympic medalist Bart Conner, who considers many of Karolyi's detractors hypocrites. 'If we want a team that looks nice in their uniforms, that isn't under all this stress, that isn't playing with pain, that isn't risking injury, then we're not going to win.'"
"When [Debi Thomas] botched a combination of triple jumps fifteen seconds into the four-minute program--she hadn't middsed a jump in practice all week--she gave up. She couldn't do what she had come to do, which was skate the best performance of her life and win the gold. She turned her triple jumps into doubles, her doubles into singles. She finished third, behind Witt and darkhorse Canadian Elizabeth Manley. In what should have been the crowing moment of a remarkable career--she did, after all, earn an Olympic medal--Thomas felt only horror and shame. 'It was like on of those tortures in Dante's Inferno. I just wanted to get it over with. I don't remember much of it. I've blocked a lot of the Olympics from my memory.' Up on the victory stand, when she accepted her medal, she felt as if she had le down her coach, her family, America and all African Americans who looked at her as a role model."
"Tara Lipinksi and Jennie Thompson embody the unspoken imperative of elite figure skating and gymnastics: Keep them coming, and keep them young, small and more dazzling than the ones we already have. The national appetite for new stars is instatiable. Deep down, we know that our consumption and disposal of these young athletes are tantamount to child exploitation and, in too many cases, child abuse. But we rarely ask what becomes of them when they disappear from view. We don't want to see them parade past us with their broken bodies and mangled spirits, because then we would have to change forever the way we look at our Olympic darlings. They are the pink ballerinas inside a child's jewelry box, always perectly positioned, perfectly coiffed. They spin on demand without complaint. When one breaks, another pops up from the next box. To close the lid is to close down that part of our sould that still wants to believe in beautiful princesses and happy endings."
Someday I want to have my own gym where I can coach a competitive team that is based on fun. I don't care how old they are or how well they do as long as they try their hardest. Some coaches say that to work less than nine hours a week for level 5 (8 and 9 year olds) is insufficient. I say give them a life and make your coaching more effective.
