Toxic Gym, Part One

I feel like we’ve been exposed to the “dark side” of the sport of gymnastics. We’re done with the far-away gym with the ever-present pressure. I recently read The Devil Wears Prada. (Can’t wait for the movie to come out.) The sad thing is that as I was reading I found myself relating to the pressure the main character lived under, but it wasn’t due to the “boss from heck”, but to the “gym from heck”. I related to the way that she couldn’t really explain why this job was consuming her life.

I’m going to attempt to put some perspective on this experience of the last five months by setting down some of my thoughts and feelings. I chalk the whole thing up to experience and I’m thankful that my daughter is very resilient and that she still loves gymnastics and still wants to pursue her dream. I’m thankful that Chuck and I are still willing to help her pursue her dream. I’m thankful that over the last five months she’s become stronger and more physically fit.

The best words I’ve heard recently were on Monday night after her six hour workout. We were still in the gym and Aimee was reaching in her locker to pull out her shorts and shoes for the ride home. She said, “I want to move gyms right now.” “I don’t want to go to Vegas and I don’t ever want to come back here.” My heart leaped because those were my feelings exactly but I wanted it to come from her.

I’m going to start out by relating a conversation I had with a Mom last summer when Aimee went to gymnastics camp at UCLA. We were both watching our daughters from a look-out window above the gym where the girls were working out. I asked her about her daughter and how long she’d been doing gymnastics. She told me that her daughter started rather late in the sport because she had done everything she could to keep her out of it and tried every other sport to try to get her hooked on something else, anything but gymnastics. When I asked her why, she told me a little bit about herself and her past life in gymnastics. In the eighties she had been a world class gymnast and an Olympic alternate.

I can’t remember exactly her age when she was sent away to a training facility in
Washington state? ( I think it was eleven or twelve). Anyway the girls who were selected for the training lived away from their families and only saw their parents occasionally. The coaching was done by intimidation. Their diets were strictly monitored, After every practice they were weighed. If anyone put on a pound or so they were humiliated by having their ponytail lifted up and mocked with “Look at the little piggy’s tail.”

If anyone complained to parents or said anything that got back to the coaches against the treatment they received they were either kicked out (which was horrible because it was their dream to be there.) or intimidated into denying everything. Of course the parents weren’t around to observe the mistreatment so they were left on their own to deal with the mental and physical intimidation.

She said she was left with permanent physical injuries an eating disorder, and only after years of therapy was she mentally able to put the past behind her. That was why she didn’t want her daughter involved in the sport and why, even though her daughter was ten, she was standing on the observation deck, watching. I listened to all this wide-eyed and taking it as a caution to observe coaching styles and any sign of mental abuse. I actually had forgotten all about this conversation until I started thinking about what to write for this blog and I came back to mind.

Of course what I’ve observed over the last five months is nothing so severe as what this Mom related to me, but the accumulation of things I’ve seen has left me very wary, exhausted, and very relieved to be moving on.

I'll post more later...