Different for Girls

Rebeca Andrade of Brazil, silver medal-winner in the all-around at consecutive Olympics, on the beam.

Aweek​ before the start of the Paris Olympics, Shoko Miyata, the 19-year-old captain of the Japanese women’s gymnastics team, was forced to withdraw from the competition by her national association. She had been reported to the Japan Gymnastics Association for smoking and drinking (on separate occasions, once for each offence). The president of the JGA, Tadashi Fujita, announced that Miyata had been sent home, and bowed deeply. ‘We apologise from the bottom of our hearts for this,’ he said. Her coach, Mutsumi Harada, added that ‘she was spending her days really burdened with so much pressure.’ Smoking under the age of twenty is illegal in Japan, and breaking this law is seen as an act of delinquency. The JGA doesn’t allow any gymnast to drink or smoke while they’re part of the team. Miyata’s punishment was harsh, and an exercise of control typical of women’s gymnastics, but it’s even worse if you know that the Japanese GOAT of men’s gymnastics, Kohei Uchimura, who won all-around gold at the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, smoked like a chimney during his whole career. Did anyone ever police what he was doing in ‘a private place at a certain location in Tokyo’? It’s different for girls.

Many coaches have tried to control, and usually to reduce, what female gymnasts ingest. The Romanian team at the 1979 world championships looked emaciated, especially their star, Nadia Comăneci, the 1976 Olympic all-around, beam and bars champion (female gymnasts also take part in a team competition and on vault and floor; the men compete on six apparatus). Comăneci could only perform on beam, because of an infected wrist that she had to have surgically drained (failing to overcome the infection presumably because she was so depleted), but Romania managed to win its first gold medal as a team. Comăneci’s coaches, Béla and Márta Károlyi, defected to the United States in 1981; their gymnast Mary Lou Retton won the all-around gold at the 1984 LA Olympics, narrowly beating the Romanian Ecaterina Szabo (the Soviet Union did not take part). In 1992 Kim Kelly was awarded and then lost a place on the Olympic team because the coaches, including the Károlyis, who made the decision thought she was the wrong shape. There’s no doubt that she was one of the weaker gymnasts, but everyone involved seems to agree that the main reason she was left behind was that she had hips and breasts. She weighed 100 pounds; Shannon Miller, who won the all-around silver for the US in 1992, weighed 72 pounds. Miller wasn’t one of the Károlyis’ gymnasts, but many coaches in the US and elsewhere shared their assumptions, and agreed that Miller had the right kind of body for gymnastics and Kelly didn’t. In Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, published in 1995, the journalist Joan Ryan described what happened to Kelly and described some of the consequences in injuries, psychological problems and eating disorders of the pressure put on young girls in the US gymnastics programme. Ryan thought her book was going to change things, and for a moment it seemed as if it might: the members of the 1996 Olympic team were older and heavier; they also won the team gold, the US’s first victory. But the coaches hadn’t changed their views.

In 1999 Béla Károlyi became US national team co-ordinator, succeeded a couple of years later by his wife. The 2016 Rio Olympics team was Márta’s last: the Final Five, they called themselves, valorising the Károlyis’ methods and influence. Regular training camps were held at the couple’s remote ranch in Texas, where parents weren’t allowed, absolute obedience was demanded, injuries were ignored and seen as a sign of mental weakness, bags were searched for contraband food and everyone was endlessly weighed. The team doctor, Larry Nassar, was popular because he gave out illicit sweets and sympathy. He also sexually abused almost all of the gymnasts, including the whole 2012 Olympic team and four out of five of the 2016 team.

Nassar became the US team doctor in 1996. One of the first people to accuse him of abuse, in 2016, was a member of the 2000 Olympic team, Jamie Dantzscher, who writes in the introduction to the 2018 edition of Little Girls in Pretty Boxes that

among all our screaming coaches when I was training, Larry was the only nice adult, and he was always on my side. He helped me with all my injuries, snuck me food and candy when I was starving, and made me laugh and feel okay when every day in the gym and at training camps was so awful. No way he was abusive. He was supposed to be the good guy.

Dantzscher only realised what had happened to her years later when she was describing what another abusive coach had done to a friend. Suddenly, she knew that she was describing what Nassar had done to her. Young gymnasts are often quite isolated and naive; they’re used to doing what they’re told and accepting adult authority; used to their bodies being touched and manipulated in ways they might not like; used to being in pain; used to being the vehicle of other people’s desires; and vulnerable to someone who is kind to them and seems to listen.

Lots of the girls and women who were treated by Nassar thought he was weird and creepy, but felt they had no choice but to see him: he was the team doctor, or for his patients in Michigan, he was the famous doctor who had pictures of famous gymnasts all over the walls of his consulting room. It was an honour to be treated by him. His favourite form of abuse was to penetrate his patients vaginally with his ungloved fingers. He claimed that he was an expert in a procedure called pelvic floor manipulation, but he used this technique indiscriminately, with no clinical justification, on hundreds of girls and women. He was banned (without anyone being told there were suspicions against him) from treating the US team in 2015 after Sarah Jantzi, who coached Maggie Nichols, overheard Nichols and her teammates Alyssa Baumann and Aly Raisman talking about him. ‘Does he stick his fingers up there? Do you jump when he does that?’ Baumann asked the others. Jantzi told Rhonda Faehn, head of the US women’s programme, that Nichols said Nassar had ‘massaged her on the groin area and too close to the vagina for the knee’ (she had a knee injury). This was in June 2015. No one from US gymnastics ever asked Baumann about this conversation, or asked Simone Biles, then as now their star gymnast, about her experiences with Nassar. Raisman and Nichols were told not to discuss the matter with anyone.

Raisman, a member of the 2012 and 2016 Olympic teams, told Faehn that Nassar had repeatedly abused McKayla Maroney, who was on the team with her in 2012 (Maroney is one of the best ever vaulters, and famous for the not impressed expression she made after winning only the vault silver in London, which went viral after the US team met President Obama, who was pictured with her making the same face). Maroney told a 2021 Senate hearing that she had spoken to an FBI officer for three hours in the summer of 2015. She told him that she first met Nassar at the Károlyi ranch when she was thirteen. The first thing he ever said to her was to wear shorts with no underwear because that would make it easier for him to ‘work’ on her; ‘within minutes he had his fingers in my vagina.’ When she was fifteen, he gave her a sleeping pill to take on the flight to Tokyo for the 2011 world championships; when she woke up, he was with her in a hotel room: ‘I was naked, completely alone, with him on top of me, molesting me for hours.’ ‘Is that all?’ the agent said.

The FBI did nothing with any of this information for more than a year, until after the 2016 Olympics. Nassar continued to abuse more girls and young women at his clinic in Michigan. USA Gymnastics paid Maroney $1.25 million to keep quiet. Unconnected with any of this, on 4 August 2016 the Indianapolis Star published an article about the mishandling of sexual abuse claims by USA Gymnastics, which led Dantzscher, a former rhythmic gymnast called Jessica Howard and a young lawyer called Rachael Denhollander, who had been treated by Nassar as a teenage gymnast in Michigan, to contact the paper. On 12 September it published their stories. When Nassar’s house was searched, a bin bag was found in his trash containing three external hard drives with 37,000 videos and photographs of child pornography. It was Nassar’s arrest in December on porn charges that finally made even those who had continued to support him realise their confidence in his ‘procedures’ had been misplaced. But USA Gymnastics bizarrely still tried to assert Nassar’s innocence, and its own. Steve Penny, its CEO, rang Tasha Schwikert, another member of the 2000 Olympic team, to ask for a supportive statement. He asked if Nassar had abused her. She said no, but knew it wasn’t true. Nassar had told Schwikert, who had an Achilles problem, that there was a pressure point in her vagina that would improve the blood flow to her heel.

But Penny could no longer contain the story. Nassar pled guilty to the porn charges in July 2017 and then in November agreed a plea deal on the other charges. He would plead guilty to a limited number of charges of criminal sexual assault and agree that his actions weren’t medically justified. There wouldn’t be a full trial, but any of his victims who wanted to would be able to make victim impact statements, On 16 January 2018 the women he abused began giving their statements; seven days later, Denhollander was the last of 156 victims to speak. A letter Nassar wrote to the judge, Rosemarie Aquilina, made clear that he still felt no responsibility. ‘What I did in the state cases was medical, not sexual,’ he wrote. ‘But because of the porn I lost all support … The media convinced [my patients] that everything I did was wrong and bad. They feel I have broken their trust. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. It is just a complete nightmare.’ Aquilina sentenced him to between 40 and 175 years. ‘I just signed your death warrant,’ she said.

A couple of days earlier Biles had admitted publicly for the first time that she too had been a victim. ‘It is impossibly difficult to relive these experiences,’ she wrote on Twitter, ‘and it breaks my heart even more to think that as I work towards my dream of competing in Tokyo 2020 I will have to continually return to the same training facility where I was abused.’ Soon afterwards, USA Gymnastics announced it would no longer use the Károlyi ranch. Biles did compete in Tokyo, a strange Covid Olympics with no crowd. She had no friends or family with her and there was huge pressure on a gymnast who was expected to win almost every gold medal and to perform with precision and brilliance, as she had in every competition since she first won the world championships in 2013. This was the first Olympics after Nassar’s actions became public, and she was the only gymnast on the team who had been abused by him. ‘I felt like I was so naive all of those years,’ she says in the Netflix documentary Simone Biles Rising, ‘thinking it was normal.’ When she vaulted in the team final she got lost in the air and plummeted down, only just managing to land on her feet. ‘It’s a trauma response,’ she says.

It remains unclear how much the Károlyis knew about what was going on in what everyone called the ‘end room’ at the ranch. Even those who did in some way realise what Nassar was doing to them were too scared of the Károlyis and of losing their chance at being on the team to say anything. ‘I knew that if I had a problem, they wouldn’t care,’ Baumann said. ‘They would just see me as an issue and go on to the next girl.’ ‘They held our careers in their hands,’ Biles says.

The fifth and youngest member of the Rio team, 16-year-old Laurie Hernandez, wasn’t abused by Nassar, but by her coach, Maggie Haney, who in 2020 was banned from coaching for eight years for verbal and emotional abuse. She told Hernandez that she was weak, lazy, fat. When her periods started she was told this meant she was too heavy (Dantzscher was told this too; so were many other gymnasts). ‘I think people forget the pressure athletes are under to look a certain way & often, be a certain weight,’ the New Zealand gymnast Courtney McGregor wrote on X recently. ‘In Rio there were scales in all the training halls, out in the open. Many teams would weigh in before & after workouts … Even on teams that didn’t “weigh in” athletes would often weigh themselves, & run over to their coaches saying “omg I’m only __ today!” to which the coach would respond “great job!!”’ Early in her career Biles was described in ways that made clear that she wasn’t the shape of the supposed ideal gymnast, a figure still stuck in the Cold War with the prepubescent Comăneci of the 1976 Olympics; she was always ‘powerful’ or ‘muscular’. ‘She has no great performance, only difficulty. She only wins through difficulty,’ Russia’s chief coach, the poisonous Valentina Rodionenko, said after last year’s world championships. (No Russian gymnasts competed there or in Paris; several have been involved in propaganda in favour of the war in Ukraine.) Biles has impeccable technique, but that isn’t what Rodionenko is getting at. Thinness, whiteness, balletic training are seen to equal artistry. Angelina Melnikova, who won gold with the Russian team in Tokyo and the all-around bronze, has repeatedly stuck up for Biles: ‘She managed to turn the world of artistic gymnastics upside down. Valentina Alexandrovna does not like her gymnastics from an aesthetic point of view. Our Russian gymnastics was always about aesthetics, and the American one was more athletic, but this is also gymnastics!’

Whatever Rodionenko says, Biles is a more aesthetically pleasing gymnast to watch than any current Russian, except on bars. In the all-around final in Paris she made a big mistake on her Pak salto and only just managed not to hit her feet on the ground. Her difficulty on the other three pieces meant that she still had a comfortable enough victory over Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade, who has now won the all-around silver medal in consecutive Olympics, but it was still a strange feeling to see Biles in third place at the halfway point. Some people think the open scoring system introduced in 2006, ending the era of the perfect ten, has led to the privileging of difficulty over style. Gymnasts are marked out of ten for execution, losing marks as they make mistakes – -1 point for a fall, -0.1 for a minor loss of balance in a turn and so on. The marks for difficulty go in the opposite direction, building from zero, with marks gained when gymnasts perform specific elements or when they connect them together. Biles always tops the difficulty category and comes near the top in execution (in Paris, Andrade, who has wonderful fluidity, extension and toe-point, had the highest execution score in the all-around).

Some of the less aesthetically pleasing aspects of contemporary routines are a consequence of the requirements of the code of points, like the pointless sideways passage of dance (arm wafting, usually) on beam or the overused non-rebounding sequences (walkover, jump, back walkover). They’re ubiquitous because they’re a relatively risk-free way of getting a connection bonus they often don’t deserve. When is a hesitation long enough to count as a deductible pause? On vault there is far too little differentiation in execution scores. This is one source of frustration for the so-called gymternet: a poor block on the vault (when the gymnast puts their hands on the apparatus and pushes off); bent, twisted or separated legs; lack of height or distance; piking down before landing; a step or a jump backwards or sideways on landing – none of these seems to make all that much difference to the execution score, which rarely varies by more than 0.5. Another annoyance is the coaches’ determination to include leaps like the Gogean (a split leap with a 1.5 turn; Biles and Andrade both try to perform it; neither usually gets it credited) or the L hop (a hop with a full turn in which the leg is held above horizontal) in floor exercises because of their difficulty value, although it’s so hard to perform them in the way the judges require that a gymnast would pretty much always get more points for performing a simpler leap perfectly.

Few floor exercises now are responses to music in the way some famous routines of the past were (watch Olga Strazheva’s 1989 routine to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring; Lilia Podkopayeva’s 1996 exercise to music from The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro; or Oksana Omelianchik’s 1985 birdsong routine). Biles’s Paris floor exercise, to music by Taylor Swift and Travis Scott with Beyoncé, had wonderful tumbling as always, but there was a lot of slightly perfunctory dancing in the corners of the floor area, where gymnasts prepare for their tumbling passes. Her compatriot Jordan Chiles’s floor exercise, to Beyoncé again, was better to watch, partly because Chiles has been doing NCAA gymnastics, which is known for its sassy and crowd-pleasing floor routines (easier to do in college gymnastics with its lower difficulty requirements); Katelyn Ohashi’s 2019 floor exercise is the benchmark here. The beautifully danced can-can by every fan’s favourite Flávia Saraiva of Brazil didn’t have the longueurs of some of the other routines and paid attention to the music rather than merely using it as background, but the present code doesn’t really reward such exercises.

Ohashi is one of the many former elite US gymnasts who found a form of redemption in college gymnastics. She was one of the last gymnasts to beat Biles, but suffered from the familiar combination of burnout, serious injury and body shaming. Like so many other gymnasts who were supposed to sweep all before them, she barely made it to senior gymnastics. The competition where she beat Biles, the 2013 American Cup, was her sole elite senior appearance. Not everyone has found college gymnastics a haven: Sunisa Lee, all-around champion in Tokyo and bronze medallist in Paris, was told she’d have to hire security if she wanted to attend classes at Auburn University in person; she stopped going to the cafeteria because people were taking videos of her eating, and she was stalked. ‘A lot of the girls weren’t the nicest to me,’ she told Sports Illustrated. ‘I just really felt like an outcast.’

The camaraderie some find in college gymnastics is much more evident in international competition than it used to be. Biles audibly cheered for Melnikova during her beam routine in the all-around final in Tokyo (after Biles withdrew, suffering from the ‘twisties’, the Russians beat the Americans in the team competition), and Melnikova said afterwards she had heard Biles shouting her name. In Paris Biles shouted, ‘Come on. You got it!’ to Andrade before she dismounted from the beam in the all-around final. One of the quite recent, post-social-media changes in the sport is that the gymnasts who once seemed to stick to Cold War divisions in their personal relations, or the absence of them, now often seem genuinely friendly. They follow one another on Instagram and TikTok and don’t pretend that they’re not watching and admiring Biles. The Chinese team in Paris were awestruck by her. ‘I want to get a picture with Simone,’ Zhang Yihan said, mock stamping her foot, at the end of the preliminary team competition. Relations might well always have been less icy than the TV made them look, between the gymnasts if not their coaches.

Despite its lengthy code of points, gymnastics remains a subjectively judged sport and thus theoretically open to corruption, or at least bias. Belá Károlyi believed that Comăneci was deliberately marked down in her final beam routine in the 1980 Moscow Olympics so the Soviet gymnast Elena Davydova would beat her for the gold (there was a wait of 28 minutes before the score was given; when it was finally agreed, the Romanian head beam judge refused to type it in). Friendships with foreign competitors can still be frowned on in a sport in which you are pretty much always representing your country. When the Romanian Larisa Iordache, who controversially hadn’t been selected as the sole Romanian representative at the Rio Olympics after the team disastrously failed to qualify, sent Biles a good luck message on Instagram (she’d lost to Biles in the all-around competition at the 2014 world championships by 0.466, still Biles’s smallest ever margin of victory), Cătălina Ponor, who had been selected instead of Iordache after coming out of retirement, was furious.

The idea that there would be only one Romanian gymnast at Rio would once have seemed unthinkable. But after the collapse of the Ceauşescu regime, funding disappeared, the equipment in gyms became rickety and unsafe, and it was no longer so easy to dragoon young gymnasts into compliance. The programme carried on seemingly successfully for a time, with Romania winning its last Olympic team title in 2004, and even after that always having one or two individual stars, but it was beginning to struggle to have enough competent gymnasts to fill a team. Many of its best juniors seemed to retire as soon as they became seniors, or regressed. Romanian bars became an embarrassment. In 2012 Romania somehow won bronze in the team final; it failed to qualify a team to the next two Olympics. Iordache, who hadn’t competed between 2017 and 2020 after tearing her Achilles, got a spot as an individual in Tokyo at the last opportunity, despite a kidney infection that landed her in hospital, but then after one brilliant beam routine had to scratch the rest of the competition with an ankle injury.

Romania qualified a team to Paris, the youngest in the competition, with an average age of seventeen and a half, but the internal backbiting continues. The current team coach, Patrick Kiens, was brought in from the Netherlands, which many Romanians involved in gymnastics seem to find insulting. Some gymnasts have refused to be coached by ‘the Dutch’, and in the mixed zone at the world championships last year, Ana Bărbosu, Romania’s best all-around gymnast, refused to be interviewed by Alina Alexoi, a journalist close to the ‘old guard’ who had been critical of her; in response, Alexoi yelled at her and called her ‘trash’. Former gymnasts have joined in: Ponor was told to leave the floor during podium training at the same championships after she tried to give Bărbosu what she called ‘advice’ – in fact, she was pretending not to know which vault Bărbosu was performing, deliberately undermining her confidence. Daniela Silivaş, one of the country’s greatest gymnasts, who won a medal in every event at the 1988 Olympics, said they were very lucky to qualify and only there to ‘participate’, not to win medals (Comăneci, who now lives in Oklahoma, has been a notable exception to this behaviour). Only one gymnast on the team, Sabrina Voinea, who is coached by her mother, Camelia, who herself performed at the 1988 Olympics, manages to escape their disdain.

In Paris, Romania managed to qualify for the team final (of the twelve teams in qualification eight go through to the final), despite a typically shaky performance on bars. Their success came in part because the French team, which won bronze in last year’s world championships, had a disastrous day. Its leader, Mélanie de Jesus dos Santos, who models for Dior and trains with Biles and Chiles in Texas, fell from bars, grabbed the beam (which counts as a fall) and fell on floor. No French gymnast qualified for the all-around competition or any of the apparatus finals. ‘I missed my Olympics,’ de Jesus dos Santos said. The disappointment was compounded by the knowledge that the French Gymnastics Federation had effectively forced out Kaylia Nemour, its best young gymnast and currently the best bars worker in the world, after an argument with her club, leading her to switch to representing Algeria.

Romania finished seventh in the team final. The Americans won, completing what Biles has called her ‘redemption tour’. The silver went to Italy, with a team that has promised much and suffered many serious injuries, and the bronze to Brazil, its first Olympic team medal, with a team that is composed mostly of women competing in their third Olympics: Saraiva, Andrade and Jade Barbosa, who’s 33 and whose first Olympics were in 2008.

Lots of gymnastics fans follow a country as one might follow a football team. My country has been Romania since I watched Comăneci in the 1976 Olympics. There have been times, especially recently, when I’ve regretted my allegiance. But when I watch Comăneci now I can still see why I fell for her. The 1976 Olympics served as a hinge between the graceful, but slightly slow and staid gymnastics of the postwar era, as represented by Ludmilla Tourischeva, who had won the all-around competition in 1972, and the new, more acrobatic gymnastics that had begun with Olga Korbut in those Olympics and continued in Montreal with the 14-year-old Comăneci, who as well as difficulty had perfect technique. Look at stills of her performing on beam: her legs are always straight and her toes pointed, every line of her body extended. The difficulty of routines increased very quickly in the late 1970s and 1980s, but their exponents remained young, flaring into prominence and disappearing just as quickly. Comăneci managed two Olympics, but not many others did. The only gymnasts in the period between Comăneci and the new marking system to compete in three Olympics were big stars: Svetlana Boginskaya, who competed successively for the USSR, the Unified Team of the former Soviet countries and in 1996 for Belarus, and won five Olympic medals; Dominique Dawes, in 1992, 1996 and 2000, who won four; and the Russian Svetlana Khorkina, in 1996, 2000 and 2004, who has seven. Boginskaya was in the Unified Team in 1992 with Oksana Chusovitina, who competed at eight successive games, ending in Tokyo representing Uzbekistan.

The gymnastics journalist Dvora Meyers wrote in 2021 about the need to move away from the intense early training that leads to injuries and burnout, allowing gymnasts to pass through the ‘emotional and physical chaos of puberty’ more or less unscathed, but noted that

the vast majority of gymnasts who have extended their careers into their twenties and beyond have also followed the early specialisation model the sport is known for. Perhaps some of them experienced more humane coaching in their early years, which probably protected their bodies and enabled them to continue longer. But even … Oksana Chusovitina … got started at the elite level at the same age as everyone else … The end of her career looks very different, but the early part definitely hews to the old stereotype.

Chusovitina is an outlier, but the move to older gymnasts over the last couple of Olympic cycles has been striking. In 2016 the US team called Raisman ‘Grandma’. She was 22. The average age of the US team at this Olympics is 22 and a half. Perhaps the main explanation is that some degree of autonomy and control, for some of them at least, has made these women want to stay in the sport, injury permitting (Andrade has torn her ACL three times; she says that Paris was her last all-around competition: ‘It demands a lot from my lower limbs, legs, knees’). I noticed, watching the team competition, that the gymnasts’ ages were shown on the screen. I can’t think of another sport in which this would be thought appropriate, although at least their weight isn’t shown, as used to happen on American TV. Kiens, the Romanian coach, said to Inside Gymnastics that there are two systems in the sport. ‘One is based on fear culture. That is basically what Márta Károlyi did … and the other one is based on empowerment … Thirty hours a week training is a lot. Without having a voice, without having a good relationship with your coach, without having good communication, you last one cycle.’ In Romania in recent years gymnasts didn’t last even that long. But the assumption that a gymnast has one Olympic cycle in her, that she can be squeezed like a lemon and thrown away, as Kiens put it, no longer obtains. You can be a gymnast and an adult. You can even have periods. But you can’t, it seems, have a cigarette or a drink. An act of solidarity makes one hope that the Japanese leadership might find it harder to impose such a ukase again. Its four remaining gymnasts, all teenagers, did a pose when they were being introduced before the team final. It was the one Shoko Miyata strikes at the end of her floor routine.