In gymnastics, it's physical age that really matters
Posted: Friday, August 22, 2008 3:27 AM
The questions about the ages of the Chinese female gymnasts aren’t going to go away. I’ve said before that if they’ve got the required documents — and the IOC and FIG, the governing body of gymnastics, say they do — there’s nothing anybody can do about it. The documents may be forgeries concocted by the government, but good luck proving that in a country that isn’t known for its openness.
I don’t know the ages of He Kexin, Jiang Yuyuan and Yang Yilin. They may not even know at this point. But I do know that calendar age isn’t the real issue here. Physical age is.
Forget 14 or 16. Physically, these girls couldn’t even pass for 12. They have no hips and no breasts. From all outward appearances, they haven’t even hit puberty, which, in women’s gymnastics, can be a career-ending injury.
The reason that gymnastics raised the minimum age for international women’s competitions from 14 to 16 was to get some actual women into the event. It was overrun by girls like the Chinese Munchkins, who had not yet hit puberty. Coaches like such girls because they are better tumblers — they don’t have to deal with wider hips and a changed center of gravity. Their ratio of upper-body to lower-body strength was also better.
Coaches worked hard to make sure the girls stayed girls. One way to delay puberty is to restrict the number of calories the children ate. Work them at a 4,000-calorie-a-day pace and feed them 1,500 calories, and they can’t grow like a normal child. In order for a girl to start menstruating, she needs a certain percentage of body fat. Keeping them skinny and underfed prevents that. Just to make sure, there are drugs that can delay puberty.
But delaying puberty delays the production of estrogen, which is critical in developing bone density. Among the job hazards of being a gymnast are arriving at the age of 30 with the bone density of a 90-year-old woman.
Setting a minimum age doesn’t solve the real problem, which is that training girls to be world-class gymnasts can be indistinguishable from child abuse. Several books have been written on the subject, one of the best being Joan Ryan’s 1995 work, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes.”
If you or I took our 14-year-old girl for a physical and the doctors saw a 68-pound waif who hadn’t reached puberty, was covered in bruises and had evidence of several joint injuries and stress fractures, we’d be in jail and our girls would be in protective custody. If a gymnastics coach does it, he or she is a national hero — if the girl does well at the Olympics.
It’s not as if the 16-year-olds or even the girls who are 18 are that much better off. They may actually have bodies that are recognizably female, but they’re absurdly tiny and undernourished.
The age minimum just increases the number of years girls can be subjected to the punishing training and constant pain that is part of the sport.
The only way to level the playing field is to forget about chronological age and adopt a rule that requires girls to have gone through puberty before they can compete. I’d throw in a minimum body-fat requirement, too. If a girl has little or no body fat, she can’t compete.
In the best of all worlds, there would also be a minimum weight based on a girl’s height. I don’t know what that would be, but it would be more than 75 pounds, that’s for sure.
