The teenage girl takes a deep breath, expanding her powerful yet flat chest. She flexes her short, sinewy legs, tensing from her tiny toes through her overdeveloped hamstrings, all the way up to her hips, which are hidden, preternaturally hollow. She breaks into a run; her arms slam at full tilt into a vaulting horse, 3 feet 9 inches high. She flies through the air like a careering javelin and then lands with a disturbing thud on a padded mat, the shock absorbed by what little is left of her ankle and knee cartilage.
Was that a feat of athletic daring? Or was it child abuse?
Child abuse? That’s the label that was affixed to women’s gymnastics last week by sportswriters from, among other places, The New York Times, the Detroit Free Press, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. The sport, thundered the Times’s Dave Anderson, “steals a kid’s life.” The occasion for this outrage was the public failure of Kim Zmeskal, the reigning world gymnastics champion, to win a gold medal in the women’s all-around competition. She finished 10th, shaken, upset and then judged by the assembled columnists to have had her life wasted.
It was an arresting sight: tiny Zmeskal pursued by large breathless reporters, demanding that she describe her disappointment. Somehow, these guys didn’t look like members of the child-protection league. It wasn’t just the scribes, of course, who were concerned. Even ordinary people, who don’t have to manufacture opinions three times a week, paused at the pictures of airborne young women as thin as any aging socialite in Tom Wolfe’s Manhattan. Jeez, Louise, are those girls all right?
The short answer is yes. They’re at least as healthy–and probably better off–than the average high-school football player who gets the living hell beat out of him each week and about whom little is said other than, “Nice game, big fella.” These girls are superb athletes, with all that phrase entails. They made it to the Olympics not just by good luck and natural skill but by extraordinary dedication and hard, painful work. They suffered: on some days their ankles hurt as badly as the wrists of a teenage cello prodigy. Other days they felt pressure as intense as a junior biologist facing the deadline for the Westinghouse science competition.
These girls aren’t shaped by their coaches; their coaches choose them for their unusual shapes. Much like legendary ballet masters, gymnastics coaches seek a particular body type. The best indicator is the girl’s mother; the coach will look her over or inspect pictures of her teenage years. Those who aren’t naturally small-boned and short seldom make the grade because they can’t displace gravity as effectively, explains Brad Smith, national team trainer for the U.S. Gymnastics Federation in Indianapolis. “If they grow too tall, or gain weight–or when they grow boobs and a butt–they may not make it,” says Smith.
But the reason female gymnasts’ bodies are so flat fore and aft is only partly genetic. Like ballet dancers, many diet strenuously to maintain their lean lines, and some, like past Olympian Cathy Rigby, confess they resorted to bulimia to keep trim. Wretched diets can have long-term effects. Young girls need to absorb calcium, or risk serious bone weakness in their teens or in later life. Furthermore, puberty simply doesn’t happen without a certain minimum amount of body fat. In young dancers and athletes, that lack of fat, combined with caloric deprivation and intense exercise, typically delays the onset of menstruation for several years. But girl gymnasts aren’t doomed to a life of arrested development. Once the young woman quits her rigorous regimen, however, she usually zips through her delayed puberty at an accelerated rate, and her reproductive capacity is normal.
The first count of the indictment against the gymnasts reads simply: they do not lead normal lives. Guilty as charged. For the most part, they come from two-parent households. Their families sacrifice for them: quality coaches can charge up to $20,000 a year. At an early age, the kids learn the virtues of hard work. True, many are sent away to gymnastics school; their parents see them only on weekends, which is more than can be said for the student body at Phillips Exeter. And most don’t have a lot of discretionary time to wander in malls or sit in front of televisions (following story).
If the kids aren’t normal, is it because of their twisted parents? Without question, many gym dads are as obsessed with achieving success for their children as Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was for his. But other parents, impressed by the passion of their young, merely try to let them fulfill their ambition. “I want children pushed to their potential,” says Dr. Richard Gibbs, a family practitioner in San Francisco and onetime ballet dancer. “It’s not fair not to do that for them.”
But there can be too much of a good thing, Gibbs says. “How do we allow children to pursue a serious endeavor and still allow them to be healthy children,” he asks. Every decent parent, at one time or another, confronts that dilemma. There is no single right answer. Parents need to make choices, and they need to examine their motives honestly–whether it’s a decision about school or music lessons or religious training. Dr. Jim Pivarnik, an exercise physiologist at Texas Children’s Hospital, says parents need to “make sure it’s for the kid and not for them. Look in the mirror and ask: ‘Do they love to do it, or do they love to do it because I love it when they do?’ "
The life of the prodigy is difficult, but that’s not the same as miserable. “I think regular, normal kids are missing so much,” says 15-year-old Lisa Ervin, an alternate figure skater on the U.S. Winter Olympic Team. “I mean, I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve been on television. If I become one of the chosen few, it makes it all worthwhile.” There are subtler pleasures too. A former teen piano prodigy will talk about his sudden realization as a child that he had power over an audience. It was, he says with adult delight, a dazzling moment, one he’s never forgotten.
Despite the psychic rewards, there are real costs: young bodies are not meant for intense sports activities. And like football and basketball, gymnastics takes its toll, placing particular stress on the elbows, ankles, wrists and spine. “The arm was not meant to be a weight-bearing bone,” says Dr. Vernon Tolo, chief of orthopedics at Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles. Also, the unnatural flips and back-arching of gymnastics produce “hyperextension” of the youthful spine that can result in chronic lower-back pain and fractures of the small bones supporting the vertebrae.
The demands on an elite gymnast–like those on any other intensely dedicated young athlete or dancer–can leave emotional as well as physical scars. Rather than dividing her time among school, social life and family, she has chosen to focus nearly all her energy on her body and her performance. How well the young athlete “normalizes an abnormal existence,” says Manhattan sports psychologist Jonathan Katz, depends on her relationships with her fellow gymnasts, her family and her coach.
For some, the coach becomes a surrogate father. A powerful figure like Karolyi engenders loyalty, love–and, sometimes, hatred. The Zmeskals, who often attended practices, liked to say that Bela did the coaching and they did the parenting. But a coach like Karolyi, much like the dean of a military school, tries to build character as well as strong bodies. There are no guaranteed results. Every gossip knows that when Nadia Comaneci left Bela she became a plaything for the ruling family of Romania, then fled to Florida and a career hawking Jockey underwear. Nadia is the Gelsey Kirkland of gymnastics. Other athletes–and dancers–grow up and prosper.
Surely the outrage last week was genuine, but it grows out of some unexamined premises. Why, for instance, has Zmeskal’s plight led to calls for the abolition of women’s gymnastics while the crippling injury to Boobie Miles, the spectacular running back on the Odessa (Texas) High football team is regarded as just a bad break? Possibly because Boobie is a boy, who has to learn to take it like a man, and Kim is a girl, who needs paternalistic protection?
Or, for that matter, what’s the difference between Zmeskal and Macaulay Culkin, the star of “Home Alone” and the product of a deeply ambitious stage father? Both have given up their childhood. Both have lived “abnormal” lives. Culkin is rich; Zmeskal isn’t. Is it all right then to sell a childhood, but not give one away in a search for excellence?
It’s never wrong to inquire about a child’s welfare. Let us all then worry about the fate of Kim and, more important, the fate of the children who aren’t blessed with world-class gifts and the opportunity to demonstrate them on a global stage. Sportswriters: you have nothing to lose but your biases!
