When I got the email from Frazzledspice about the Olympic book write-off, my first impulse was to chortle demonically as I hit the ‘delete’ key. After all, I have as much fun watching the Olympics as an agoraphobe does at a rock concert. To me, Olympic coverage means bad, bad things: things like two additional weeks’ pre-emption of my favorite TV shows. Things like NBC turning truly exciting Olympic moments such as the U.S. women’s soccer team beating archrival China for the gold medal into a highlight reel, while spending precious airtime running soft-focus athlete ‘profiles’ that have more in common with Behind The Music than with sport. Things like the unwelcome re-emergence of such on-air personalities as John Tesh, whom audiences feared could burst into song at the least provocation, and who covered the most disturbing Olympic event of them all: women’s gymnastics.
But since I like Frazzledspice, and since I get it that other people really like the Olympics, I quietly saved the message as I tried to compose a polite refusal. One that didn’t use phrases such as ‘competitions between world-renowned pharmacologists,’ ‘pre-menopausal sprites,’ and ‘chest-thumping American jingoism’. Because I feel more and more strongly every four years that the Olympics is no longer a celebration of true, unfettered athletic prowess, but a massive tourism/marketing campaign built on the backs of blood-doped youngsters who were ripped from their families at tender ages and asked to serve as metaphors for the hopes and dream of the world’s dispossessed.
And then I got stuck in the West Palm Beach airport for four hours with nothing but a California Pizza Kitchen and a WH Smith standing between myself and the slimy tentacles of derangement. The BBQ Chicken Pizza of Despair rot in my bowels as I skimmed such ‘literature’ as Instyle magazine and the inexplicable bestseller Who Moved My Cheese. Thoroughly desperate, my eye fell on an unassuming tome with the intriguing title Little Girls In Pretty Boxes: The Making And Breaking Of Elite Gymnasts And Figure Skaters. I plunked down my corporate Amex with impunity and plugged my laptop into the phone port to secure my writeoff slot straightaway.
So here I am, and that’s my book. If you haven’t figured it out by now, if you’re looking for Olympic tales of amazing heroism, this opinion is bound to poop on your parade. You may want to hunt for those elsewhere.
I don’t mean this in a condescending way, but I would rather gnaw off my own arm than watch figure skating or women’s gymnastics. (I am really, really sorry, Mom.) Simply put, women’s gymnastics gives me the creeps. At least in men’s gymnastics, they’re rewarded for being physically strong; in women’s gymnastics, the ones that seem to be closest to a fetal state are the ones that are deemed to have the appropriate grace to pull in the high marks.
Mercifully, gymnastics ONLY flares up every summer Olympics, and we only have to endure two weeks of these desperately somber pre-menopausal sprites before the sport goes back to hibernating in the Cave of Obscurity for another four years. (Figure skating, on the other hand, is in danger of becoming a regular programming feature, burnished and proffered by ‘networks’ such as Fox, showing competitions such as USA Versus THE WORLD!!!! because they’ve lost their NFL broadcast contracts.)
Rant, rant. Um, so, OK, the book. The book was written by Joan Ryan, and was first published in 1995. This new version was repackaged and republished this year, with an update on the state of these two sports today. The book is thoroughly unscientific and reads like a cross between the This Boy’s Life, The Biography Of Karen Carpenter, and the HBO movie The Positively True Adventures Of The Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom. It’s rife with viciously domineering parents, pathetic lost little girls, and an evil figurehead in Bela Karolyi.
It opens with the horrifying stories of Christy Henrich and Julissa Gomez , both promising, world-class young gymnasts. Christy fell prey to anorexia. Julissa just fell, breaking her neck during a difficult vault called the Yurchenko while warming up for an international competition. The author alleges that both women’s situations were a direct result of the abuses of the system: in Julissa’s case, she claims that the young girl was deathly afraid of that particular vault but had been berated and bullied by her coaches (first Bela Karolyi, who dumped her from his gym; during the accident, her coach was Al Fong) to perform it; she feared that if she didn’t, she’d be cut from his gym. For Christy, the author claims that Fong as well as other trainers and her parents constantly harped on her weight until she simply stopped eating.
Both girls wound up dying.
The book is long on anecdotes and assertions and short on facts, but the facts that are there are frightening:
In 1956 the top two Olympic female gymnasts were thirty-five and twenty-one years old. In 1968, gold medalist Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia was twenty-six years old, stood 5 feet 3 inches, and weighed 121 pounds....[many years] later, Nadia Comaneci clutched a baby doll after scoring the first perfect 10 in Olympic history. She was 5 feet tall and weighed 85 pounds.
The decline in age and size among American gymnasts since Comanici’s victory is startling...by the ‘92 Olympics in Barcelona, the average U.S. Olympic gymnast was 16 years old, stood 4 feet 9 inches, and weighed 83 pounds.
The author acknowledges that the sport does attract tiny girls, but also provides some scary, semi-credible scientific information about how the sport stunts their growth, sometimes for life. Many elite gymnasts do not begin menstruating until they stop competing. And she points out that these girls, who sometimes are groomed for the Olympics from as early as 5 or 6, train with near-constant and debilitating injuries. They train as much as 60 hours per week. If you made YOUR 10-year old daughter work in a factory 60 hours a week, people wouldn’t call that the noble pursuit of athletic excellence: they’d call it child abuse.
The update at the end touches on the relative health and strength of the ‘96 gold-winning women’s team as hopeful evidence that things in the sport are changing, but can’t help slipping in the Sang Lan accident and the Dominique Moceanu controversy as proof that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Bonus picture sections break up the reading, which is at roughly a seventh-grade level.
Overall, the book careens through the stories of gymnasts and skaters, touching on the trials and tribulations of nearly every well-known gymnast and figure skater, including a tedious rehash of the Harding-Kerrigan saga. For the most part, the skating sections fall flat, victims of too little first-hand information and lapses in consistency. But the gymnastics parts, for better or worse, are riveting pulp. Sadly, it’s riveting because if even half of that stuff is true, those poor girls go through absolute hell. And for what? To be picked apart by John Tesh during a two-week period in September? To be sure, some gymnasts and figure skaters do seem to be happy and well-adjusted, continuing to reap lifetime benefits from their time in the sport. I personally would just rather not watch.
Little Girls In Pretty Boxes is a fascinating if not entirely credible read. As tabloid, it’s engrossing; as a work of literature, it’s mostly crap. It’s a great fast read for a long layover or a day with the flu.
Big ups to Frazzledspice for organizing this write-off and for allowing me to stay in it, being my cynical self, even when she saw my book choice. Please go on over and read the following epinionators’ selections for some true, uplifting tales of Olympic triumph: taurusmoon, frazzledspice, redlass, kcfoxy, elorraine, jenninca, caravan70, penguinlady, and auntieemma.
Recommended:
