Women's Gymnastics: The Big Mac of the Beijing Games

If you have been reading this blog, you know that I am somewhat conflicted about the Olympics. There is the beauty of the games, and an ugly pervasive undercurrent that can leave you queasy. It's like eating at McDonalds: so tasty at first, so nauseating upon reflection.

If the Olympics are McDonalds, then women's gymnastics is without question the Big Mac. There is the remarkable, CGI-like athleticism by all the young women involved. Then there is the knowledge that the competitors have had their bodies and health manipulated and warped so they can execute on the springboard.

Last night of course was what Sports Illustrated's EM Swift called "the marquee event of these Beijing Games" the women's gymnastics team finals where China and the US went head-to-head. China won, and in a staggering act of hypocrisy, all that US national team coordinator Martha Károlyi and her husband Béla (banned from coaching the team for unspecified reasons) could do was bellow about how the Chinese team violated age violations and cheated their way to the gold. (Béla calls the Chinese gymnasts "half people.") The media has run with this, raising hell with accusations that the Chinese were using several gymnasts under the age of 16. The Chinese coach, Lu Shanzen smartly responded, "If you think our girls are little because of looks, then maybe you should think the Europeans and Americans are strong because of doping."

Let's forget the terrible irony that the media is all too concerned about Chinese gymnasts who aren't 16 but have turned a blind eye to the way Chinese child labor has been used to prepare Beijing for the Olympic games. Béla and Martha Károlyi launching these attacks is like hearing George W. Bush criticize Russia for invading Georgia: they simply have no moral standing whatsoever. The Károlyis' success in gymnastics is unparalleled. They have coached nine Olympic champions, fifteen world champions, sixteen European medalists and six US national champions. Yet to deal with the Károlyis is to deal with the devil. Their reputation for starving young girls on 900 calorie a day diets and verbally abusing them so they can be light enough to stick the landing, is infamous. There have even been reports suggesting that Béla has had young girls practice on broken bones. As 1996 Olympian Dominique Moceanu said last month, "If it was up to the athletes, [the Károlyis would have been banned from the sport] a long time ago." She also once said, "I'm sure Béla saw injuries, but if you were injured, Béla didn't want to see it...You had to deal with it. I was intimidated. He looked down on me. He was 6-feet something, and I was 4-foot nothing."

The Károlyis were the driving force behind the dominance of the "4-foot nothing gymnast", dramatically and irrevocably transforming their sport.

As Joan Ryan wrote in her harrowing book, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes:

In 1956 the top two Olympic female gymnasts were 35 and 29 years old. In 1968 gold medalist Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia was 26-years-old, stood 5 feet 3 inches and weighed 121 pounds. Back then, gymnastics was truly a woman's sport....[In 1976] 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci clutched a baby doll after scoring the first perfect 10.0 in Olympic history. She was 5 feet tall and weighed 85 pounds. The decline in age among American gymnasts since Comaneci's victory is startling. In 1976 the six US Olympic gymnasts were, on average, 17 and a half years old, stood 5 feet three and a half inches and weighed 106 pounds. By the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, the average US Olympic gymnast was 16-years-old, stood 4 feet 9 inches and weighed 83 pounds, a year younger, 6 inches shorter and 23 pounds lighter than her counterparts of 16 years before.

Béla Károlyi of course trained Comaneci and later defected, took his act to the states and hasn't looked back, making millions on the brittle backs of young women who bodies are misshapen on account of his ruthless pursuit of gold. Yes, women's gymnastics can make you queasy all right. And the thought of Béla Károlyi, bending his huge frame over to get in the face and scream at young girls, is enough to really make you sick.

Comments (9)

1. It is a great advantage in gymnatics having a small frame and being light. The low center of gravity being an advantage is a no brainer. But, being smaller helps in many ways. Smaller feet on the balance beam helps, the shorter the running stride the less chance of going out of bounds in the floor routines.

   The Chinese indeed were the best at the Olympics, but if they get to field 12 year olds, every country competing should be able to do likewise. Either everyone follows the rules, or just get rid of the rules so others aren't punished for following them.

   For example, they could make the floor routine area bigger to take the advantage of being smaller away (at least the boundry problem) they could make the balance beam 0.5 or 1 inch thicker to allow taller people with bigger feet a chance to compete.

   There are a lot of things the IOC could do to stop the sport from eliminating older atheletes from being able to compete. I am with Frank on a few issues here though. First, the participants need to be physically and mentally tough to handle the pressure of the sport. Secondly, if China violated the age rule, they should lose their gold medals. The girls for China performed brilliantly and were a sight to behold, but if China knowingly put underage girls out there to compete, and then hid or falsified documentation so they could compete, China should lose the gold medals.

   Posted by Wolfgang1 at 08/13/2008 @ 11:42am

2. To respond to this article by observing that women's (i.e., girls') gymnastics is "not a sport for sissys" is to completely miss the point. First off, no sport (or any other worthwhile human endeavor, for that matter) is for "sissys" if you mean by a sissy someone who doesn't take the sport seriously/isn't prepared to work at it. But to take this to mean (as frankgrits evidently does) that anything a coach does in pursuit of victory is acceptable shows a complete absence of a moral compass. If being forced to practice with broken bones is acceptable, why not verbal abuse (of which the Karolyis are, by all accounts, masters) forced starvation, or (for that matter) electro-shock treatments or regular canings?

   It makes me wonder how frankgrits would respond if his boss started abusing him on a regular basis on the grounds that Frank's job (whatever it might be) "isn't for sissys".

   Posted by iamcfar at 08/14/2008 @ 1:10pm

3. Frankgrits is also missing the point that the athletes under 18 are <i>minors</i>, and that the decisions made for them by coaches and parents are not (at first) their own. When these girls begin their training they're as young as 8-10 years old - hardly mature enough to fully comprehend what's required, and what the training regiment will do their bodies and psyche. We do not allow minors to work full time, nor do we regard them as adults concerning major life decisions. Why do we make an exception for gymnastics, which takes as least as much time as a full-time job and affects these girls' bodies and psyches to an enormous degree? Being a "sissy" has nothing to do with it - and I have to say that an adult (presuming Frankgrits is one) calling children names is grotesque and unbecoming.

   Posted by Jeff Norman at 08/14/2008 @ 4:43pm

4. I don't think that abuses committed by the Karolyis, or that they may well have distorted the sport of "women's" gymnastics, make it acceptable for China to break the rules. I saw Chinese competitors with the bodies and faces of little girls. Are these cases of puberty delayed by rigorous training and resulting low body fat? I doubt that's the whole story. But in any case, if Olympic rules don't include a way to seriously investigate the actual ages of athletes, they should! Medals have been revoked on account of other infractions.

   Posted by Gervasia at 08/14/2008 @ 4:55pm

5. Plurals of words that end in y end in ies. The plural of sissy is sissies. I am a sissy, and I know. The proof? I see no point in reading tough-talking diatribes written by people who can't spell.

   Posted by chessw at 08/14/2008 @ 5:03pm

6. Competitive sports can be dangerous, particularly at the Olympic level. Eveybody knows this, yet some are willing to sacrifice themselves (or their children) to make it. I agree its a sad state of affairs, but there isn't much to do about it.

   Posted by jsens at 08/14/2008 @ 6:06pm

7. Good post. Over here in Britain there has been lots of critical media on the Beijing Olympics, the usual suspects of human rights and propaganda mostly, but this has brought two things my to mind (at least) and I would be interested to read what y'all have to say.

   Throughout all the debates (over here) has come the canard that a citizen in a democratic state cannot be held responsible for what their state does - in respect of "so our government has done this but we are not responsible" -, which made me think: if that is the case then it must be doubly so for people of a non-democratic state. But then I thought that a democratic citizen is responsible for their elected representatives, after all the democratic system is an ideal, why? because it gives the citizen the power to elect or reject a government, a responsibility in other words. If the democratic citizen has no responsibility for their elected representatives then it must be because we don't have a democracy at all, or it may be a position taken by a people who have their cake and are damn well going to eat it!

   The second thought that came to my mind was expressed by Gervasia above: that just because one state (or the states of Britain and America) has done wrong doesn't mean that another state (in this case China, but recently also Russia) should do wrong too. This is true, but surly such criticism is tainted by the wrongs of the critic's state: it's a bit like accepting moral opprobrium from a pedophile about your child-rearing practices!

   No, I'm not saying that we shouldn't criticize others than ourselves but I am proposing that such criticism is unlikely to be respected, that one would have to rely on brute power to have such criticisms accepted because diplomacy has been blown away by hypocrisy.

   Posted by Dynamis at 08/14/2008 @ 7:52pm

8. 1. China broke the rules by allowing girls under 16 to enter the Games. Since they broke the rules, their medal should be rescinded. US Girls' Team should win the Gold, PLAIN AND SIMPLE.

   2. Yes, it's a fact that being small and light is a huge advantage in gymnastics. The Asians are typically already a smaller-framed race (this is not racist....it's a fact!), so they're already at an advantage. This fact coupled with the fact that they're competing at below the age of 16 gives them a major undue advantage...and, they're breaking the rules (the age rule). We're now starving our American girls to compete with them. "Fine" (not really). But, you CAN'T ALLOW 12-, 13-, 14-, and 15-year-olds from one country to enter the Games without allowing the same ages from all other countries to enter. So, the Chinese SHOULD HAVE THEIR GOLD MEDAL RESCINDED. THEY DID NOT WIN IT FAIR AND SQUARE. They did not win it by playing by the rules.

   THE US WOMEN'S TEAM SHOULD BE HONORED WITH THE GOLD BY FRIDAY, AUGUST 15. IT'S COMPLETELY UNFAIR.

   And regarding age rules, keep the age at 16 FOR EVERYONE so that our children don't suffer broken bones, etc., which are harder to heal at a young age.

   Furthermore, in the Individual Women's All Around, is it just me (as well as the commentators), or were they giving completely overblown scores for the two Chinese gymnasts, and not giving high enough scores to the two Americans? In the end, we won the Gold and Silver, which is great. However, I don't think the Chinese gymnast should have won Bronze. The Romanian as well as the Russian each had much better events.

   Posted by antigop at 08/15/2008 @ 10:38am

9. No one has hit on a main point in all of this. It has been mentioned numerous times during the competition that when these young girls are selected at a tender age, they are removed from their homes, sent to live at government training facilities and get to see their parents once a year. What the *&^%!!

   These are not adults making well informed decisions about their futures. They are babies doing everything they can to win the approval of adults they put their trust in. Some succeed, but at what cost?

   Bela should keep his mouth shut about any moral outrage he may have. He would take advantage of any edge he could get away with without the slightest hint of guilt about damage to "his girls."

   Another problem is the US acting as moral custodian. We want to win at all costs and will forgive almost any sin; rape, murder, etc. (except betting on games) Mike Tyson, PacMan Jones, Ray Lewis, Kobe Bryant, Steve Howe, and even Michael Vick.(yes, he'll be back. As long as you can perform, someone will pay for your services...)

   Also, some very stupid comments in some of the posts I can't resist commenting on:

   frankgrits was obviously trying to get a rise out of people. He couldn't be that stupid.

   Wolfgang saying they should make the floor ex area bigger or the balance beam wider to make up for size difference. Yeah right... AND we'll lower the basketball hoop for shorter players and get bigger horses for fatter jockeys, as well.

   antigop,... "And regarding age rules, keep the age at 16 FOR EVERYONE so that our children don't suffer broken bones, etc., which are harder to heal at a young age." hmmm..about as wrong as you can be. Injuries heal MUCH quicker when you are younger, Doctor Clueless.

   The damage is more psychological, which is much harder to heal.

   Posted by csquared22 at 08/18/2008 @ 11:27pm