She is 100% correct. USA Gymnastics is one of the premier Olympic sports in this country. TV ratings for woman gymnastic routinely hit 30 million and is a source of pride for the country. But the price for those medals is completely unacceptable. Congress gave the US Olympic committee a charter and it entirely appropriate that a high visibility investigation is needed. There are many sports where teenagers compete and we have to prevent this crap from every happening again.
It’s been getting a LOT of coverage in this area – it’s not the lead story on the local news but it has been given a lot of air-time.
It has nothing to do with the victims, and what i’m about to say in no way is trying to minimize what has happened, but i have a problem with Olympic level sports where the ideal body type seems to be pre-teen, and the average age is something like 15. There’s some very weird and distorting selection pressures that kids that young are simply too immature and young to make by the nature of the sport are being subjected to.
Like this article in the Houston Chronicle states:
Choosing a Coach
By the time a young gymnast turns 5 years old, he or she can master more complex gymnastics skills if regular training and classes have been going on for a few years.
You’ve got to start selecting gymnastic coaches at 5? You think 5 year olds are mature enough to decide if they’re going to be gymnasts?
I think the whole fallout of a culture that prunes and preens essentially pre-teens so that they’re either Olympic level athletes or not by the time they hit their teenage years is so fundamentally and grossly distorting the athlete’s interests and the interests of their handlers and teams that, tbh, it does seem adjacent to abuse, and maybe the abuse perpetuated by this doctor is just a peek behind the curtain of the kind of minor and major abuses of authority that happen when your athletes peak at such a young age.
I’d like to see minimum ages of like 18 for all Olympic level athletes enforced just to help curtail (or slow down) the march of pre-teen kids into the Olympic athlete grinder, so that at least when they’re participating they’ll be somewhat old enough to have a bit more agency in deciding on their participation.
That kind of environment is like a petri dish for growing pedophile rings. Are all the enablers going to get away with it again? Do they just get to pretend that they’re so naive they never imagined what could go wrong at a gymnastics training camp?
I disagree. The Olympic game should be a competition between the best athletes period. The world is filled with child prodigies in all kinds of human activities, music, math, chess, programming,
video games, and certainly especially in sports. Do we really want to deprive a 15-year-old Michael Phelps from competing in the Olympics?
A combination of biology and physics make it pretty much inevitable that gymnastics and diving are going to be dominated by teenagers especially for women sports since girls mature earlier than men.
There is always a downside to focus single-mindedly on activity as young person. But I’m pretty sure that majority of Olympian would make the sacrifice again, even with the perspective of age.
But it is also clear, that children aren’t in a position to judge what is harmful to them. The win at all cost perspective drives many/most? coaches. The parents aren’t in much of a better position either (plus some of them place horrible pressure.) I do think that some type of child advocate roles is needed in all sports that have a large number of teenagers that compete at the Olympic level.
A number of careers require intensive training long before the person involved is old enough to decide whether they really want to do that thing for a living. A would-be virtuoso classical musician has almost no chance of success if they haven’t already begun by the age of 7 or 8, for example.
If extreme excellence in a number of fields is desired, you have to start when people are very young.
I’m totally sympathetic to that position and understand it but my hang-up is precisely on this point i highlighted, because it’s actually the opposite of maturing early in gymnastics. The girls tend to actually delay puberty through their heavy exercise regime rather than the opposite, because maturing young women’s physiques are actually less optimal than younger bodies - both geometrically (size to length to center of gravity) to the changes brought about during puberty.
So in this case it’s actually delaying maturing rather than maturing early that is the optimal body type. And (imo) that’s… got some very… problematic consequences for the entire sport.
To put bounds on the problem, let’s create a hypothetical horrible example. What if there were a sport called… oh, let’s call it “Crawling Under the Couch” or “Fits into Tiny Spaces”. Clearly, the smaller the better, so the younger the better. Pretty quickly you’re getting 5 year olds competing for this weird sport and obviously that would be wrong.
My point is that the things we emphasis in gymnastics are kinematically best accomplished with pre-teen bodies in girl’s gymnastics. Why don’t we create gymnastic goals that teenaged and adult bodies excel at instead?
I agree this would be optimal, but unfortunately it not only takes the nation to change its approach, but the world. We’ll get there someday, barring extinction level events.
Because that is not how high level competitive sport works.
I don’t remember the age limit now but I do remember the minimum age to compete was raised several years ago when the Chinese team seemed to be extremely young.
Gymnastic participants have to be a certain age, minimum which I think is 16, not pre-teen… They can’t use someone too young with additional flexibility due only to age. China’s team gets called out often for possible violations in this area, and there is often doubt about the official documents provided.
I get your point with this sport but there are several sports that have… shall we say, issue with the type of participants in the sport or you know, just drugs.
Ugh. Isn’t that considered child pornography?
Dunne told the Times that she was contacted by Lubin in 2004 and that he offered her work with Big Apple’s mini-troupe. But first, she would have to model for his “personal photography business."
Also, who else is in this this personal photography business of his? I assume he has a collection.
I would say yes, certainly.
It seems like they should use stronger words than sexual misconduct. I mean MeToo is important but it seems like we need to highlight the ones that target children differently.
It looks like #metoo has had a big impact on Canadian politics over brief period of time:
- JIm Baillie, leader of the Nova Scotia's Progressive Conservative Party
- Patrick Brown, leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party
- Kent Hehr, Liberal federal cabinet minister
desired by whom, though? Its probably not the 5 year old who says she wants to be a world class violinist, or boxer, or whatever. Thats why we protect children with laws, because they aren’t old enough to respond to this kind of pressure, when faced with idiotic parents.
It behooves to remember, that for every Michael Phelps, Wozniacki, or whomever we have, there are thousands who fails, and gets ruined.
“Ruined” based on what?
I would agree there is too much emphasis on doing this to young people, but look at all sport now. By the time a kid is in his double digits if he likes a sport and wishes to compete in his future at any level he may end up practicing and playing that sport year round. Summer leagues take up the time of millions of families in many sports. The Olympics is just the nadir of a few.
But she may express joy in the music and willingness to learn. The fact that no 5 year old understands what a ‘career’ is in all its complexity (although ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ is a commonplace question for that age) doesn’t mean that we should wait until they’re 18 before we teach them things or encourage them to excel.
And I don’t think that somebody who spends their childhood getting very good at a sport or musical instrument, then doesn’t quite make it and ends up needing to do something else for a living, is in any sense ‘ruined.’ They are still getting a regular education, or ought to be.
Well, I think the “ought to be” there is part of the issue. I think of those awful parents showcased on the child pageant shows, for instance. You get a lot of overcommitted parents who are, I dunno, trying to live out their own failed dreams through their kids, or whatever their weird motivation is, pushing the children well past the limits of what is reasonable, healthy, or safe, all in some mad charge toward excellence in a field that might only really have “room” for two or a dozen or a hundred people for whom it winds up being financially worthwhile, or what have you.
A lot of these kids suffer something damned near abuse, if not actual abuse. . . and I’m not just talking about the creepyfuck Dr. Likeskids in US Olympics, either. A dozen or more years spent weathering neverending pressure and expectations and practice and travel and demands and failures and reprisals can be a stunningly awful environment to grow up.
Which isn’t to say that every parent who introduces their kid to hockey at age 5 and wistfully sighs about their kid growing up to be the next Gretzsky is an abusive sack of shit. . . but there are plenty that are, sadly :(