Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters - Softcover

Ryan, Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446676829 ISBN 13: 9780446676823

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2000

Synopsis

From starvation diets and debilitating injuries to the brutal tactics of tyrannical gymnastics guru Bela Karolyi, "Little Girls in Pretty Boxes" portrays the horrors endured by girls at the hands of their coaches and sometimes their own families. An acclaimed expose that has already helped reform Olympic sports -- now updated to reflect the latest developments in women's gymnastics and figure skating -- it continues to plead for sanity, safety, and an end to our national obsession: winning at any cost.

About this title

About the Author

Joan Ryan is an award-winning journalist and the author of four books. She was a pioneer in sports journalism as one of the first female sports columnists in the country. Ryan's wide-ranging newspaper work spanned 25 years, earning 13 Associated Press Sports Editors Awards, the National Headliner Award, the Women's Sports Foundation's Journalism Award and the Edgar A. Poe Award from the White House Correspondents Association.

Ryan is a founding trustee of Coaching Corps in Oakland, CA, and since 2008 has been the senior media advisor to the San Francisco Giants. She lives in Sausalito, California, with her husband, sportscaster Barry Tompkins.

From Booklist

Ryan, an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, offers disturbing anecdotal evidence indicating that women's gymnastics and figure skating are physically and psychologically damaging to a majority of participants with realistic Olympic aspirations. Ryan's emphasis is on gymnastics; figure skating is a cutthroat sport, to be sure, and it encourages bulimia, but compared to gymnastics, it's almost pristine. Ryan documents that between the years 1976^-92, the average U.S. Olympic gymnast became a year younger, six and one-half inches shorter, and 23 pounds lighter. The sport not only attracts tiny girls, it manufactures them: these days the demanding physical requirements of championship women's gymnastics can only be met by prepubescent, very light, very flexible girls. Control their weight through intimidation, delay the onset of puberty via exhaustion and starvation, and voila{ }! You've got little girls forever. But by delaying puberty, one also inhibits the production of estrogen, which is essential for adult bone density. There are now former gymnasts in their twenties with the bone density of 90-year-olds. Equally damaging is the obsession with weight passed on to young gymnasts by their coaches. Onetime Olympic hopeful Christie Henrich weighed less than 50 pounds when she slipped into a coma in July_ 1994 and died. Ryan portrays the gymnastic training of Olympic hopefuls as systemic, sanctioned child abuse. It's a nightmare vision that may forever change one's image of those herculean efforts by such Olympian pixies as Olga Korbutt and Mary Lou Retton. Expect this shocking expose{‚}to attract major media attention. Wes Lukowsky

Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0446676829
• ISBN 13: 9780446676823
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288