In 2004 the Orange County Register investigated the culture of abuse that would eventually lead to Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse of at least 140 female gymnasts and other young athletes. Given the recent events it’s worth taking another look at.
SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: GYMNASTS IN PAIN;
Out of balance;
An extensive survey of current and former elite U.S. female gymnasts reveals a culture in which pain and suffering are acceptable risks in the quest for success
By the time Alyssa Beckerman arrived for a U.S. national team training camp at Bela Karolyi’s Texas ranch, three months before the 2000 Olympic Games, she wasn’t sure what hurt worse.
The year-old break in her wrist that hadn’t been allowed to heal?
Or her stomach burning from nerves and a daily diet of anti-inflammatory drugs?
The 19-year-old U.S. champion broke her wrist a year earlier, but she continued to compete and train 40 hours a week — pressured, she said, by an often-screaming coach who accused her of faking the injury and driven by her own desire to win Olympic gold.
“That’s what you’ve been dreaming about since you were a little girl,” she said.
By the time she retired from international gymnastics later that year, Beckerman had broken nine bones and undergone two surgeries.
The Orange County Register interviewed nearly half of the roughly 300 women who competed on the U.S. junior or senior national teams from 1982 to 2004 and found that the obsession with Olympic gold has created a system in which injuries are so prevalent that athletes are as likely to require surgery during their ca reers as National Football League players.
More than 93 percent of the women interviewed suffered broken bones or had injuries that required surgery.
Current and former U.S. national team members — almost all girls in their early and mid-teens — portray a culture that repeatedly places girls in danger. Girls at a critical stage in their physical and psychological development are pushed by star-struck parents and overbearing coaches. They train year-round as much as 12 hours a day, often living thousands of miles from home and isolated from peers.
Like Beckerman, they do so often with broken bones or torn muscles and almost always without regular, if any, medical care, while coping with pressures and expectations similar to those for highly paid pro athletes.
The Register also found:
The rate of injuries has almost doubled since 1996 as women train longer and try more daring and dramatic maneuvers. At the same time, USA Gymnastics, the sport’s national governing body, has curtailed its Athlete Wellness Program.
Nine out of every 10 gymnasts interviewed said that they had continued to train on injuries that resulted in broken bones or surgery or that they had resumed training without getting clearance from a doctor.
The sport’s obsession with weight and diet, especially within the U.S. national team program, often has led to eating disorders. U.S. gymnasts competing in the 2001 World Championships said they were provided so little food that family members smuggled snacks into the team hotel by stuffing them inside teddy bears.
Three out of four retired gymnasts interviewed continue to experience health problems related to gymnastics.
Top gymnastics officials downplayed the Register’s findings.
Robert V. Colarossi, chief executive officer of USA Gymnastics, insisted his sport is no different from any other.
“Elite athletes in every sport push themselves to the limit,” he said. He noted that the 22 years covered in the Register’s survey was a time of change in the sport.
“It’s unfair to draw an analysis over that many years,” Colarossi continued. “The kids are doing skills that are more and more difficult. The equipment is getting better but still has a ways to go. The (scoring) is more difficult. In the past the sport was based more on artistry, and now it’s based a lot more on skill.
“The one thing that hasn’t changed is gravity. That’s the constant.”
Colarossi acknowledged gymnastics has “a lot more (physical) impact than other sports.”
Don Peters, head coach of the 1984 U.S. Olympic team, said he didn’t believe the injury rates were as high as the Register found but said the comparison between gymnastics and the NFL is valid.
“We’re both contact sports,” said Peters, owner of the Scats Gymnastics Academy in Huntington Beach. “But in gymnastics we’re dealing with very fragile athletes who don’t wear protective gear. We’re doing really dangerous things. We’re flying through the air …
“I think you have to remember whatever goes up has to come down. And every time something comes down, there’s a chance somebody’s going to get hurt. Considering everything, I think we do an amazing job.”
But gymnasts and longtime observers argue that both the scope of gymnastics injuries and the environment in which they occur separate women’s gymnastics from other sports. USA Gymnastics does not keep injury statistics and never has conducted a survey as extensive as the Register’s investigation.
“If you put gymnastics under a big microscope, you’ll find a lot of neglect, abuse,” said Dr. Ian Tofler, a child psychiatrist who has written extensively about concerns with youth sports, in particular gymnastics.
For more than 30 years, Americans have been captivated by a competition that offers a mix of glitter, drama and risk unmatched by other Olympic sports as little girls with big smiles and bigger hearts defy gravity and the imagination. Record numbers of Americans tune in every four years to what has become the Summer Olympics’ marquee event.
But behind the sequins, smiles and perfect 10s is a sport that has left a generation of young American woman bearing physical and psychological scars many will carry for the rest of their lives.
Stories similar to Beckerman’s were repeated by more than 100 women who have represented the United States at the Olympic Games, World Championships and other major international competitions.
Doctors discovered 22 stress fractures on the spine of Olympian Kelly Garrison.
Double Olympic medalist Kathy Johnson said she took so many anti-inflammatory drugs to cope with her injuries that she had to wash down the pills with Maalox.
Melinda Baimbridge, a U.S. team member in the late 1990s, trained with a fractured back even though her legs turned numb.
“The system we have in this country is the survival of the fittest or the luckiest,” said Dr. Lyle J. Micheli, director of sports medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston and a professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School.
“It’s not a good model at all.”
A decade after the deaths of two gymnasts, athletes and longtime observers said, USA Gymnastics continues to make international success a higher priority than health.
Julissa Gomez broke her neck while competing in Japan in 1988. She went into a coma a few days later and died in 1991 without ever regaining consciousness. Christy Henrich died in 1994 from multiple organ failures stemming from her eating disorders. Shortly before she died, the 4-foot-11 Henrich weighed 47 pounds.
“People don’t see the real sport,” said Sierra Sapunar, a recent U.S. team member. “They see what looks pretty and elegant on the surface, but they don’t realize what really goes on. All the nerves and pain and emotion and fear and abuse. How you’re afraid to talk about how much you hurt because you know your coach will either yell at you or make you continue working out.”
Gymnasts and other longtime observers said focusing solely on abusive coaches misses a deep-rooted cultural obsession with an American sport whose defining moment came at the 1996 Olympics. Believing the United States needed a high score to clinch the country’s first Olympic team gold medal, Kerri Strug, competing on torn ligaments in her ankle, drilled a vault for the ages, then was carried away in the arms of her coach, Bela Karolyi.
“That moment is emblematic of the problem,” former U.S. team member Michelle Hilse said.
The problem is cultural, said University of Georgia coach Suzanne Yoculan, who has coached a dozen U.S. team members. “It’s this whole race to win the Olympics and the whole craziness of it. It’s the whole mentality of the parents, coaches and the athletes.
“It’s the all-American dream to win the Olympic gold medal, and things have gotten way out of perspective.”
And too often, former gymnast Johnson said, the sport has forgotten who the dreamers are.
“I think we have to remember,” Johnson said, “yes, these are world-class athletes, but they’re also little girls.”
Demands, injuries rise
American girls are being pushed harder than ever to reach that Olympic dream. As the sport has become more difficult — and dangerous — the intensity and volume of training has increased.
An estimated 3.4 million girls participate in gymnastics in the United States — many of whom got their start in tumbling classes as toddlers. About 80,000 athletes today are registered with USA Gymnastics.
These girls begin working their way up a ladder, each step determined by the girl’s skill level, starting with Level 1 at the bottom and rising to Level 10 at the top. With each level, the training gets harder and longer. The time demands and pressure are greater.
At the very top of the sport in this country are the 120 women who compete at what is known as the elite level. It is from this group that U.S. national junior and senior teams and, ultimately, the Olympic team are selected. This deep talent pool has provided the foundation for perhaps the most successful period in USA Gymnastics’ history.
At the 2003 World Championships in Anaheim, the U.S. women won a record three gold medals, including the first-ever team title for an American squad.
The U.S. women won the team silver medal at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, where Texan Carly Patterson became the first American woman in 20 years to win the Olympic all-around crown.
But that success has coincided with a sharp rise in injuries, the Register found in its interviews with 122 elite gymnasts.
“There’s so much rampant abuse of every form,” said Melissa (Wells) Freigang, a U.S. team member in the mid- 1980s. “(USA Gymnastics) just looks at it as the price of competing in the Olympics, and that’s really sick. It’s a sick culture.”
Women whose stints on the U.S. national team ended in 1994 or earlier averaged 2.75 broken bones or injuries that required surgery during their careers. Women who competed for the United States after 1996 averaged four such injuries. Overall, more than 68 percent of the gymnasts interviewed by the Register said they had undergone surgery. By comparison, 65 percent of NFL players suffer injuries requiring surgery, according to studies by the NFL Players Association and Ball State University.
“I had my first knee surgery when I was 12, and I pretty much had some kind of surgery every year after that,” said U.S. champion Kendall Beck, a member of the 1997 Worlds team.
Karolyi, the renowned coach, dismissed the Register’s findings. “A gross exaggeration,” he said. “There are no problems with our sport. We have an action-packed sport, and from time to time people get injured.”
But Olympic champion Patterson acknowledged the risks. “It’s a dangerous sport,” said Patterson, who competed in the 2003 Worlds with a fractured elbow that would require two screws to hold it together. “It’s really tough on your muscles and joints and bones. It’s a lot of pounding every day.”
How much pounding? Consider this: A gymnast can reach a height of 10 feet on her dismount from the uneven bars. Imagine standing on a basketball rim and jumping onto a mat less than 8 inches thick, several times a day, seven days a week.
Gymnasts also are expected to perform increasingly more difficult and dangerous maneuvers to get high marks. Under today’s scoring, for example, the routine that earned Nadia Comaneci a perfect 10 at the 1976 Olympics likely would earn an 8.0, said Peters, the Huntington Beach coach.
Although the National Collegiate Athletic Association prohibits teams in all sports from practicing more than 20 hours a week, most elite gymnasts, some of them 10 years younger than college athletes, train twice as long each week.
And the 40-hour workweek is now year-round because of USA Gymnastics’ so-called Karolyi Plan. Under the plan, largely designed by Bela Karolyi and implemented in 1999, U.S. team members are required to attend nearly monthly training camps in which they undergo physical testing and perform in a competition-like setting. With this increase in training has come an increase in overuse injuries.
Between 1990 and 1995, overuse injuries — injuries that build up over time and cannot be tied to a single incident — accounted for 54 percent of all injuries to U.S. team members, the Register found. Since then, these types of injuries make up 62 percent of all injuries.
“You look at the amount of hours we’re putting in now, and it’s a lot more than it was in ’82,” said Mohini Bhardwaj, a member of the 2004 Olympic silver-medal-winning squad, who added that she has had good relationships with club coaches. “The coach has to be aware of what’s going on.”
concerns ignored
At a time when the sport is demanding more of gymnasts, USA Gymnastics and top gyms have downplayed or ignored injury and health concerns. Few gyms have trainers or medical staff on site, and USA Gymnastics has cut back programs dealing with injury and health awareness.
The Athlete Wellness Program, created and directed by 1972 Olympian Nancy Thies Marshall, was intended to raise awareness within the sport about issues relating to nutrition and injuries. Marshall held courses for coaches in 1996 and 1997. The courses were well-attended and well-received, Marshall and several gymnasts said
But in 2000, a USA Gymnastics women’s program committee made up of top coaches and federation officials decided to stop funding the Athlete Wellness Program as a pro-active educational service. Top coaches thought its impact, Peters said, was “little to none.”
“I think it was all based on a faulty premise — that doing gymnastics at a high level causes eating disorders,” Peters said.
Marshall said it was made clear to her by USA Gymnastics officials that the program was getting in the way of Olympic success.
“There are key coaches who just didn’t think it’s a valid program, that don’t believe that a sports psychologist or a nutritionist deserves a spot at the table when you’re trying to win a medal at the Olympics,” Marshall said. “When (USA Gymnastics) leadership changed, there was clearly a mandate to do what it takes to win gold medals and put people in the driver’s seat and allow them to make decisions and follow them. And the ones in the driver’s seat didn’t want this program.
“We’ve got to ask ourselves what’s more important — winning a gold medal or our kids’ health? And I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive.”
The Athlete Wellness Program now consists of a referral network of doctors, trainers and nutrition specialists posted on the federation’s Web site.
Despite the coaches’ complaints, several top gymnasts said the loss of the Athlete Wellness Program in its original form has left a void and contributed to the high injury rates.
“I think the biggest thing missing right now is that there needs to be more education,” said Theresa Kulikowski, a 1995 World Championships bronze medalist who has had operations on her knees, back, neck and shoulder. “The coaches definitely need to be educated on injuries, not only the impact of an injury. They need to learn not to doubt their gymnasts when they say they’re hurt.
“The more they doubt their gymnasts, the more the gymnasts doubt themselves, and that’s a bad situation,” Kulikowski added. “Coaches need to learn that pain is a sign that you should stop, that a line needs to be drawn.”
Bela and Martha Karolyi said they believed the Athlete Wellness Program is unnecessary.
“These girls are all healthy,” Martha Karolyi said. “We don’t really need special help or anything like that.”
No two coaches are more influential in American women’s gymnastics than the Karolyis.
For all his enthusiasm in public, Bela Karolyi was cold and ruthless in the gym, gymnasts said.
“I’m sure Bela saw injuries, but if you were injured, Bela didn’t want to see it,” 1996 Olympic gold medalist Dominique Moceanu said. “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.”
Bela Karolyi insists he took a “very healthy approach” to injuries. “When we saw there was an injury, we got the gymnast to the right person right away,” he said.
Moceanu is also quick to credit Karolyi for her success.
“We made history,” she said of the U.S. victory in Atlanta. “That’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. You’re on the Wheaties box.”
Although Bela Karolyi has stepped away from an official capacity with USA Gymnastics, he remains one of the most influential figures in the sport. Martha Karolyi, as the U.S. national team director, has more control over which athletes earn spots on Olympic and World Championships teams than anyone else.
Gymnasts say Martha Karolyi runs the U.S. program with the same dictatorial tactics the couple used in building the Romanian dynasty in the 1970s.
“Martha Karolyi thinks it’s a communist country, and she’s going to win the gold medal at any cost,” said Kim Kelly, a member of the 1991 U.S. World Championships team. “And I think it’s a shame because they don’t care how many girls they hurt to get it.”
The Karolyis disagree.
“That’s her opinion, I guess,” Martha Karolyi said. “I think we have a very good program.”
While the Karolyis have been the model for hundreds of coaches, the problems extend well beyond them, to gyms from California to Pennsylvania. Ninety-four percent of the gymnasts interviewed said they did not have a medical trainer in their gym.
“The medical care just isn’t there,” Harvard’s Micheli said. “There are a lot of gymnasts slipping through the cracks.”
Micheli is one of a number of doctors who recommend gymnasts training more than 30 hours a week be examined by a physician every three months. Few gymnasts, however, follow that advice. “You only go to the doctor when you’re bleeding or something’s broken,” said Amy Young, a U.S. team member in the late 1990s.
Parents know dangers
The likelihood of serious injury and the harsh training methods do not prevent parents from spending tens of thousands of dollars each year to fund their daughters’ dreams of becoming the next Mary Lou Retton.
“A lot of those of us who have kids at this high level ask ourselves, `Should we be doing this?’ ” said LaNae Taylor, whose daughter Allison, 16, trains with Patterson and 2003 World uneven bars champion Hollie Vise at the World Olympic Gymnastics Academy in Plano, Texas. “I keep wondering when Child Protective Services is going to come and take me away.”
Still, Taylor and hundreds of parents continue to send their daughters to the gym each day.
“It’s her dream,” Taylor said. “I’m letting her follow her dream.”
U.S. national team member Lindsey Vanden Eykel tore her hamstring and the growth plate off her pelvic bone while competing on the vault in 2001. The injury would lead to a series of operations, including one in which two screws were needed to reattach the muscle to the bone. Another surgery in June 2003 was needed to scrape scar tissue from the bone. Vanden Eykel also has had a series of surgeries on both knees.
Yet her mother, Cathy Vanden Eykel, said she never considered pulling Lindsey out of the sport.
“It would be a lot more damaging to prevent her from doing what she dreams to do,” Cathy Vanden Eykel said. “If she was at a lower level, you’d probably say enough is enough. But when she’s an international elite that does have this ability, I would never take that away from a kid. If you have a talented violinist, you wouldn’t tell him he can’t play because his fingers are crooked.”
Diana Baimbridge said she paid $30,000 a year to send her daughter Melinda to Cypress Gymnastics Academy, a Houston-area gym that placed at least 18 girls on the U.S. national team in the 1990s. Many parents spend even more.
Often, gymnast Brittany Thome said, girls continue training with serious injuries because “you don’t want to let your parents down. You think they’re spending all this money and time on you, and you don’t want them to think it’s not worth it.”
A few years ago, Ellyn Hardman went to a rodeo in her native Texas with a group of friends. Hardman was alarmed at the sport’s danger.
“That’s crazy,” Hardman recalled saying. “I wouldn’t let my kid do that.”
A friend turned and gave Hardman a skeptical look.
“She said, `What are you talking about?’ ” Hardman said.
At the time, Hardman’s daughter Katie was a member of the U.S. national team.
“She was right — this is just as crazy,” Hardman said about gymnastics. “Any parent that goes into this sport not thinking it’s dangerous is a fool.”
coaches in control
At the center of the gymnast’s universe is the coach. Too often, athletes said, many coaches take advantage of their stature by pushing girls too hard even when it’s clear that they’re hurt.
Hilse, a U.S. team member in the 1980s, said she was struck in the head by a well- known coach after breaking her hand while training in Texas. Hilse declined to name the coach. “He yelled, `Get out of my face,’ ” Hilse recalled. “Then he slapped my head and yelled, `Stop your crying.’ ”
Tears are common in a system where girls ranging in age from 6 to 18 flock to gyms in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida in hopes that world- renowned coaches can make their Olympic dreams a reality. In chasing those dreams, elite-level gymnasts train 30 to 40 hours a week.
To accommodate this schedule, many girls are home-schooled. Some girls, by the time they reach junior high, already are living away from their families to train at a top gym in another state or on the other side of the country.
“The only people you see are gymnasts,” said Heidi Kaye, a 1989 U.S. team member. “The only people you talk to are gymnasts and coaches. Socially, you have no idea what the hell is going on in the real world. You’re so isolated.”
In 1998, U.S. champion Beckerman, then 17, left her family in New Jersey to train at the Cincinnati Gymnastics Academy under Mary Lee Tracy, who had been on the coaching staffs for the 1996 Olympics and six World Championships.
Many elite coaches, athletes said, try to control every aspect of a gymnast’s life. “Mary Lee used to ask me to hate my mom,” Beckerman said. “She would always say, `You don’t want to be like your mother, do you?’ She said my mom was wishy-washy.”
Although Beckerman is critical of Tracy now, the coach said they once shared a common goal — the Olympic Games.
“I just want to say that I am disappointed to hear that these are Alyssa’s memories of her time with me in Cincinnati,” Tracy, who coached Beckerman for three years, said in a statement. “We did our best to help her and her family reach Alyssa’s goal of making an Olympic team. Our staff thought we all worked well together during her short time at Cincinnati Gymnastics.”
In the year leading up to the 2000 Olympics, Beckerman said Tracy had her training as much as 10 hours a day while consuming fewer than 1,100 calories — 400 calories less than the recommended daily figure for a moderately active 2-year-old, 25-pound toddler, according to the Baylor College of Medicine.
Beckerman, in fact, said she was downing anti-inflammatory drugs more often than she was eating.
She was taking Advil by the handful, in addition to Vioxx and Celebrex. She also was receiving monthly cortisone shots.
It was a familiar routine for Beckerman, who would suffer nine broken bones and undergo two surgeries during her career.
When her training shifted to the pre-Olympic camp at the Karolyis’ ranch, at the end of a dusty red dirt road deep in a central Texas forest, Beckerman said her wrist throbbed constantly. She said the combination of drugs and nerves worn thin from Tracy’s criticism and the pressure of an Olympic year left her in so much stomach pain she could barely stand.
The only time the pain was close to tolerable, Beckerman said, “was when I was lying in the fetal position.”
She was in the middle of a 20-minute running exercise conducted by Bela Karolyi when she became sick and rushed to the bathroom.
Beckerman had a bleeding ulcer.
“I was worried that they would accuse me of faking it,” she said. So she struggled, doubled over, back into the gym to get a USA Gymnastics staff member to return with her to the bathroom to verify her problem.
“You need to come with me,” she recalled saying. “There’s something wrong.”
Beckerman’s account was corroborated by other athletes.
Similar pleas by gymnasts have been met with yelling, contempt, disbelief, swearing, threats and even physical abuse, according to dozens of gymnasts who said they were told by their coaches to train and compete for months on injuries ranging from broken ankles and wrists to torn anterior cruciate knee ligaments to fractured backs. Dozens of gymnasts said they even trained while wearing casts on broken limbs.
“I got to the point where I couldn’t walk,” said former U.S. team member Freigang, referring to ankle injuries, “but I was still expected to compete.”
There were so many serious injuries at Cypress that in the late 1990s a Christmas card put together by the club’s athletes featured a pile of their crutches, casts and braces.
“You could tell the coaches `I’m really hurting’ and they would say, `Well, you really need to keep working,’ ” recalled Baimbridge, a U.S. Olympic Festival balance- beam champion.
“Sitting down or taking a break to get healthy was never an option,” she said.
It is not that way in every gym. Former U.S. team member Marie Fjordholm, who trained at the World Olympic Gymnastics Academy, said the coaches there have created “a loving, nurturing place. I was never afraid to tell them my back hurt.”
But gymnasts said the Plano atmosphere is rare in a sport where constant verbal abuse has had a chilling effect. Sixty percent of the gymnasts interviewed said they were either verbally abused by their coaches when they told them of injuries or were afraid to raise the subject with the coaches.
“The first thing they do is accuse you of making it up,” said Sheehan Lemley, a U.S. team member in the late 1990s. “That’s the last thing I wanted them to think. So you hold it in until it gets really bad, until you can’t walk.”
Lemley trained so long on an injured ankle that six surgeries haven’t been able to repair it.
“I basically ruined my ankle,” she said.
Lemley’s situation was repeated by scores of gymnasts.
“We all went through that hell all the time,” said Sunja Knapp, a U.S. team member in the late 1980s who trained at Berks gym in Redding, Pa.
Before she was 14, Knapp broke her back three times.
“You’d rather hide the pain, even if you had a broken bone, because you were so afraid of getting yelled at by your coach,” Knapp said. “That’s how sick it was. You were so worried about looking weak in front of your coach or getting yelled at by your coach that you’d just continue to hurt yourself. It was ingrained in our heads.”
Some coaches, concerned about U.S. national team selections, encourage gymnasts to hide injuries, gymnasts said. Other coaches see their athletes competing with a broken bone or blown-out knees as a badge of honor.
At U.S. national team training camps, former gymnast Freigang said she witnessed “coaches bragging about how they had girls with broken backs and they were still competing.”
Yet many gymnasts said that, even when faced with training for months on a broken bone and the almost daily verbal abuse, they didn’t walk away because they had long been trained to accept injuries and pain as the price they had to pay for Olympic glory.
“You’re taught from the time you’re a little girl that you just have to put up with the pain,” said Jamie Dantzscher, a 2000 Olympian.
In this environment, some girls see self-inflicted injury as the only escape from the daily physical and psychological pain.
“You start to see a serious injury as a way out,” Freigang said. “You think `If I mess up on this move, it will break my neck.’ I honestly thought about that.”
pushing to the edge
U.S. women’s gymnastics is a sport in a hurry, driven largely by a mind-set in the nation’s coaching community that a female gymnast’s window of opportunity comes early and is very small.
But top coaches and some former gymnasts insist it is simplistic to place blame solely on coaches in a sport in which some gymnasts push themselves to the edge when they believe an Olympic medal is within reach.
International rules require a gymnast to turn 16 the year of the Olympic Games or World Championships to be eligible to compete. But those rules haven’t slowed the injury rates or diminished the pressure, and the international calendar is full of major competitions open to pre-15-year-old girls.
By comparison, male gymnasts enter their prime in their early 20s. Five-time U.S. all-around champion Blaine Wilson was 30 in Athens. Because of the age difference, the men are more likely to stand up for themselves, and their bodies are more mature and capable of handling a heavy training regime, gymnasts, coaches and doctors said. The sense of urgency so prevalent in women’s gymnastics is absent from the training of teenage boys.
“In this country, gymnasts come built-in with an expiration date,” said Michelle Campi, a silver medalist at the 1991 World Championships. “There’s this whole idea in the sport that if you’re 16, you’re over the hill. So it’s rush, rush, rush, push, push, push. It’s an obscene craziness.”
Two-time Olympic champion Shannon Miller said it’s inaccurate to portray gymnasts as unwilling victims of star-struck parents and abusive coaches.
“It’s a mistake to think those girls aren’t choosing to do what they want to do,” Miller said. “I don’t think people give girls enough credit for knowing their own bodies.”
USA Gymnastics chief Colarossi agrees.
“At the end of the day, it’s the athletes who are driving the train,” Colarossi said. “They’re the ones going to the gym every day, raising the level of excellence. They’re the ones trying to do things that have never been done before. And when you do that, you put yourself in a position of risk.”
Four-time U.S. champion Kristen Maloney is an example of how far gymnasts will push themselves. When a stress fracture in her right shin wouldn’t heal, Maloney had a titanium rod inserted into her leg, enabling her to compete in the 2000 Olympics. The first rod was replaced in 2001 with a thicker one. But the second rod was placed too high, putting stress on her knee. So in the summer of 2001, Maloney underwent a third surgery. Less than a year later, she was unable to walk. Maloney was suffering from an infection that was eating at her bone. Another surgery removed the rod and cleaned the infected area.
“I was in so much pain I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I was just crying and popping Tylenol PMs.”
Despite the ordeal, Maloney said, “I don’t have any regrets.”
Others, such as Ron Thompson, a psychologist at Indiana’s Bloomington Hospital, however, question whether young teenagers are “capable of making decisions that could impact the rest of their life.”
Psychiatrist Tofler said parents are abdicating their responsibilities when they let young girls make decisions that have potential long-term ramifications.
“Would you let your 12- or 13-year-old have sex just because they want to?” Tofler said. “It’s the same argument when you let them overtrain.”
legacy of pain
While a gymnast’s career might be brief, her pain often lasts a lifetime. Injuries suffered as teenagers continue to hound many gymnasts decades later.
Some women still in their teens already are battling problems usually found in the elderly. Diane (Cushenberry) Park remembers sitting in an Oklahoma examining room while four doctors looked at a spinal X-ray.
Park’s doctor asked his three colleagues how old they thought the woman in the X-ray was. The three doctors agreed she was at least in her 60s.
Park’s doctor shook his head and pointed to her. The X-ray, the doctor said, belonged to Park.
She was 18.
Recent U.S. team member Fjordholm had a similar diagnosis at 19.
While a gymnast’s career might be brief, her pain often lasts a lifetime.
“I’ve been in constant pain since 1985,” said Lisa McVay, a U.S. team member in the 1980s who broke her back at age 15. “I live with it daily. I deal with it constantly.”
Fifty-two percent of retired U.S. team members who spoke to the Register have undergone surgery for gymnastics-related injuries.
Double Olympic medalist Johnson has had five knee surgeries since standing on the 1984 medal podium.
Fifty-four percent of the gymnasts interviewed continue to suffer major back problems.
Knapp, the U.S. team member from the 1980s, fractured her back three times between ages 12 and 14. Today, at 31, she sometimes needs a half-hour to get out of bed in the morning.
Former Olympian Garrison is facing knee surgery and hip replacement at age 37.
Many gymnasts said they would not put their children in the same position.
“I would never let my child do (gymnastics),” said Kristin McDermott, a 1991 Pan American Games gold medalist, echoing scores of former gymnasts.
In 1994, Campi was training 10 hours a day, six days a week for the World Championships Trials. “I was emotionally tired,” she said. “I was exhausted. I was an accident waiting to happen.”
The crash came late in a workout while Campi was working on a move on the uneven bars. She lost her grip, fell and landed on her back.
“I don’t think she broke anything,” Campi recalled her coach telling her mother, Celi Campi, who was in the gym at the time.
“My mother said, `She needs to take a break. She needs a break,’ ” Campi continued. “He said `No, we’ll soak her in an ice bath after (practice). She’ll be fine.’ So he made me climb back up on the bar. It was really painful. I dropped down and had this sensation that I was going to throw up.”
Celi Campi finally took her daughter to the emergency room. Campi had fractured her 9th, 10th and 11th vertebrae. Rods had to be inserted to support her spine.
None of it seemed to matter as Campi lay in a hospital bed that night.
“It was really weird,” she said. “Life as I knew it was over. I was lying there in bed, and I wasn’t thinking about whether I was going to be able to walk again, I wasn’t thinking about what was going to happen to my life, was I going to be crippled?
“I don’t know if relieved is the right word, but I kept thinking, `At least I don’t have to go into the gym tomorrow. I don’t have to go back into the gym.’ ”