If this has been asked, forgive me. I couldn’t find anything on the boards by searching.
How long has there been a requirement that female gymnasts be 16 to compete in the Olympics?
According to Age requirements in gymnastics - Wikipedia this rule was instituted in 1997. The article there deals with the minimal exceptions in pretty decent detail.
Thank you, Soul!
Any ideas why it’s limited to gymnastics?
We have a 14 y/old diver who is competing this week.
Is gymnastics particularly hard on young bodies, in a way that other sports are not?
Fundamentally, each sport has its own rules.
Ed
I’d presume it’s partly because the younger you are, the smaller you are, and a smaller, lighter gymnast has a much easier time pulling off difficult moves than a larger, heavier gymnast. Gymnastics is a game of inches, where each pound of weight lost can mean another quarter inch in jump height, which makes it just a hair easier to stick your landing. I can’t imagine that the situation is quite the same in diving.
Basically, I reckon it’s about leveling the playing field. If the rule weren’t in place, countries could start training their gymnasts at age 3, push them for 10 or more hours a day until they’re 12, and rush them into the Olympics. By the time the next one rolls around, they’re too old, so they have the one shot and their sporting career is over. Now they’re a teenager with little in the way of schooling or marketable skills, way behind their peers in everything but the ability to stick the landing on a double pike. And countries that don’t want to sacrifice their young girls in that fashion will be at a disadvantage. Setting a firm age limit helps to discourage that system.
There have been grumblings that China has been falsifying the age of some of these tiny little gymnasts you’re watching:
As it is, severe diet and training regimens tend to delay onset of puberty in these girls.
From a background article on gymnastics: http://www.ausport.gov.au/ais/nutrition/factsheets/sports/gymnastics
That’s the nub of the problem - women’s gymnastics actually favors prepubescent competitors, which creates problems - it’s supposed to be WOMEN’S gymnastics, not little girl’s gymnastics. There have been proposals that there should be a minimum weight limit of, say, 85 pounds. Or weight classes, as alluded to in that first article. That strikes me as possibly more sensible than the age limit.
Here is the Chinese Women’s Gymnastics team. The smallest is 4’6", 68 lbs. (Bela is absolutely sure some of them are under age.)
If they changed the rules and judging, such that “women’s gymnastics actually favors prepubescent competitors” wasn’t the case any more (thanks yabob), that would fix the problem, but I consider that unlikely in the extreme. No one is suggesting that the competitors in the men’s competition are too young.
On the other hand, several of the women on the USA team have actual figures, and if they hadn’t choked on the floor exercise they would have been in contention for the gold. It’s not clear (to me) that the whole prepubescent thing is a real factor, it’s just the way the Chinese have been doing it for a thousand years.
If Shawn Johnson (who is 16) takes the all-round, which is quite possible, will things change in Chinese gymnastics training to make it more like the USA program? I suspect not.
So now the top 2 women in world gymnastics are 18 (Nastia Liukin, gold medal) and 16 (Shawn Johnson, silver medal). Will the Chinese program change? Don’t bet on it. 