I am going off the recent case ofLarry Nasser, the gymnast doctor recently sentenced for abusing the gymnasts.
I dont know much about gymnastics but I have heard it can be a tough sport with coaches who can be pretty brutal at times. Plus the sport demands tolerating pain. Think of the pain when hitting the parallel bars! Think of the hard stretching! I do know gymnasts start young and hit their peeks in their early teens. They practice long hours (4-9 hours a day even). The girls get used to coaches pushing them to their limits.
Also injuries can be devastating and a doctor who has a record of fixing problems would be sought after. The girls might ignore or not report if a doctor penetrated them or did something else wrong to them if they somehow felt this was a normal part of treatment.
In this realm I would like to ask, do you all think gymnastics would be more prone to abuse than other sports - say soccer?
Even totally leaving aside the sexual abuse scandal, it is absolutely a sport with a higher potential for abuse and that’s precisely because the athletes peak so young.
They are subjected to tremendous physical punishment, insanely long practices, severely restricted diets, and immense psychological pressure. And I say “subjected to” because it’s so often their parents who are pushing them into it, when they are too young to really be able to decide whether they want to do it or not.
Gymnastics is totally fucked up. I don’t think there’s any other sport where the same level of arduous pressure on young children exists.
The only thing that might come close is wrestling. The kids with the hardcore wrestling parents start out really young, and by the time they’re in high school, they are really under tremendous pressure. Now, this is true of baseball and football too, but there’s a difference. Out of all the sports I played, wrestling had BY FAR the most brutal practices, and a big part of that was the combination of physical conditioning with the pressure to make weight, which thank God, I didn’t have to really worry about because I was not a starter and had no ambition of vying for the top spot. [Rather than having separate varsity and JV teams, our team - which included freshman through seniors - selected the starters through a weekly “wrestle-off” where the guys in each weight class could compete for the starting spot if they wanted to.]
The guys who really took it seriously - and it was often because of pressure from their parents - those guys were in the sorry situation of going through these practices, which involved far more sprints and pushups than actual wrestling, while severely deprived of adequate nutrition. I can remember guys at lunch saying, “I can’t eat today, I gotta make weight.”
But EVEN WRESTLERS don’t peak as early as these gymnasts do. You don’t have fucking high school students wrestling in the Olympics.
Remember when the scandal in Olympic gymnastics involved China getting an unfair advantage, since underage girls can be that much better at it than 16-year-olds?
Yes, I remember a Chinese-American reporter talking to the girls in their language and asking the girls their age which they slipped and said “14, I mean 16” and if whether or not the girls parents were attending (most did not know) and one said she hadnt seen her parents in a year.
That’s because male gymnastic events tend to be focused on pure strength, as opposed to the combination of strength and agility for female events. They’re really two separate sports, which happen to have the same name and a little bit of equipment in common.
And I can’t really describe them as “men’s events” and “women’s events”, because of the age of so many of the competitors.
Yes, because it involves so much one-on-one interaction between young, eager girls desperate for success and a single adult with little supervision.
The environment is also “pedophile friendly”. Parents, impressed by a coach’s reputation for developing Olympic champions and eager for their children to become just that, allow a level of unsupervised personal interaction that they would never allow under any other circumstances. University officials, eager for success and the alumni donations that come with it, take a head-in-the-sand approach when it comes to recognizing a problem.
One of Nasser’s accusers related how her father, in a violent state of denial, actually shook her by the throat and demanded that she admit that her accusations were lies. Once it became undeniably obvious what Nasser has actually been doing to these girls for years, he took his own life.
Convicting and punishing Nasser and those of his ilk is simply not enough. The entire environment must change.
For male gymnasts, the need for strength makes puberty an advantage. For female gymnasts, puberty is a disadvantage; there have been accusations of delaying it through both chemical means and starvation. As male puberty takes place later, that by itself would skew the males older; add that they’re likely to be as strong or stronger than any abuser and there’s less likelihood of abuse. I still expect it to happen simply because any time you have people with power over others there will be some who abuse that power - but it is less likely.
Female gymnasts peak early, because at puberty the center of gravity tends to shift lower (to the hips) and women gain fat and grow breasts, which changes the strength-to-weight ration. Thus it becomes more difficult to do the flips and turns.
There used to be speculation that the Soviets and Eastern Europeans gave drugs to their gymnasts to block puberty, although I have also heard that it was done simply thru calorie restriction.
I don’t know if gymnastics is any more prone to sexual abuse than any other sport. I can see a case to be made that the system the Chinese and Eastern Europeans use, to select promising candidates and drive them mercilessly, as being abusive. Readwhat the East Germans used to do with their Olympic swimming teams.
I heard a podcast from Max Aita, who trained under the Bulgarian weight lifting coach. Their lifters would work up to a max in the squat, eight times a day, six days a week. If a lifter burned out or got injured, who cares. There are twenty more eager to take their place so they don’t have to work in a factory all their lives.
In a sense, if we got rid of olympic gymnastics it would change.
Consider high school and even college gymnastics are not near so tough and the girls in college are in their 20’s. I asked out local high school gymnastic coach what “level” the girls were at and she said they didnt even use those but in reality, they would be about level 6. Level 10 is olympic level.
While the peak age may make gymnastics abuse more likely at the full National team level, I think there’s still a lot of opportunities for more local abuses.
I know when I’ve watched college volleyball over the past couple of years, commentators have mentioned that many girls are going through initial college recruitment/commitment as early as Jr High/Middle School. So maybe you don’t make the actual Olympic team until you’re 25, but if you want to get there in the US, you pretty much have to go to a university with a top-level volleyball program, and you’re getting that set up possibly as early as 12 or 13.
That problem is kind of specific to the US, though, with the peculiarity that recruitment for US college sports is international. In other countries you don’t go to college to play sports.
My youngest was a competitive gymnast. She brought home some regional and the occasional national trophy. She stopped at 13.
Yes, the girls peak young. Too much flipping and basic physics says the shorter it is the faster it turns. The boys do much less of that and can be nationally competitive into their early 20s.
Abuse in sports, no. But abuse in sports linked to being able to choose a college based on sports, yes. I was answering dzeiger’s post right before mine, not the OP.
Our swim team hosted an international invitation meet back when I was in my teens (in the 80s). One of the teams was from East Germany: the girls had broader shoulders, more muscle mass, and deeper voices than all of the guys on my team. The girls on my team were freaked out hearing them in the lockerroom, thinking there were German men in there with them. They won everything they raced in, but looked miserable.
The other thing going on with my team, was our coach sleeping with a succession of 15yo girls on the team, while his wife was pregnant a couple times. Several of my teammates were Olympic hopefuls, so under intense pressure. But just as ripe with opportunities for abuse as any similar sport. I don’t know that girls’ gymnastics is worse for that type of abuse, but it certainly seems to do more damage to the bodies of young girls in training and competing than any other sport I know of, so it’s certainly worse in that regard.