Indignities for Sport
CW: child abuse, eating disorders, substance abuse
ALL EYES were on Kamila Valieva at the 2022 Winter Olympics. Valieva, a fifteen-year-old Russian figure skater known for her balletic grace and impeccable technique, made her debut on the international competition circuit in October 2021. She not only swept the competition at every event, but set new records, too — she earned 90.45 out of 100 possible points at the European Figure Skating Championships in January 2022, the highest score in figure skating history. Having already redefined the limits of the possible in her sport, no one questioned that she would skate her way to gold in Beijing. When Valieva skates, her body seems more like a conduit to the heavens than that of a child — it’s easy to forget how young she is until you see her await her scores clutching a stuffed plush toy in her lap.
But Valieva did not seize the gold. It was her training partner Anna Shcherbakova — who earned 21.4 fewer points than Valieva at the European Championships — who came in first place, followed by teammate Alexandra Trusova in second and Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto in third. What shocked figure skating enthusiasts the world over was not only Valieva’s loss (in the final event she fell twice and was unable to land any of her quad attempts) but the way her coach, Eteri Tutberidze, cruelly berated her for her mistakes when Valieva finished her routine. Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympics Committee, described Tutberidze’s treatment of Valieva as “chilling.” It was an excruciating scene. Valieva appeared distressed, her eyes stinging with tears as her coach humiliated her and then ignored her for the rest of the event. Tutberidze seemed indifferent, unembarrassed of the way she had shamed a young girl for the whole world to see.
Unfortunately, Valieva’s public shaming was not the only scandal surrounding her performance at the Olympics. Had she placed in the top three, there would have been no medal ceremony because she failed a drug test, which found three banned heart medications in her system. Valieva’s mother insists she accidentally dosed the medications by sipping from her grandfather’s water glass, but a preponderance of the evidence suggests otherwise: the levels of TMZ in Valieva’s system were too high to be accidental. Tutberidze has defended meldonium, a banned substance, saying “it only helps recuperate the heart muscles,” and in 2019 teammate Anastasia Shabotova — thirteen years old at the time — said on Instagram Live: “How to perform consistently? Drink a lot of dope and you perform stably. That’s all. You just need to drink the right dope.” Valieva was allowed to compete only because, as a fifteen-year-old, she is a “protected person” under the World Anti-Doping Code. The Court of Arbitration for Sport decided that disqualifying Valieva from competing in Beijing “would cause her irreparable harm.” But the spectacle at Beijing made many onlookers wonder if Valieva has not already been irreparably harmed by the training that made her Olympic-worthy in the first place.
Tutberidze received the “best coach” award from the International Skating Union in 2020, despite a clear public record of forcing her skaters into eating disorders and pushing them to train and compete through serious injury. Rita Wenxin Wang at Slate says Tutberidze’s former students have alleged she forbids skaters to drink water at competitions, forces them to take Lupron, a puberty blocker, and subjects them to daily public weigh-ins and verbal and physical abuse. Yulia Lipintskaya, a breakout star who won the gold medal in Sochi at the age of fifteen, was forced to end her career shortly after her eighteenth birthday due to a knee injury. She revealed to the Russian press that she had suffered from anorexia for “not just one year, or two, or three” and sought treatment at a rehab center in Israel. Tutberidze’s team had instructed her to ingest powdered nutrients as substitutes for food in order to keep her weight down.
Russian coaches are notoriously unforgiving. Filmmaker Marta Prus gave the world an insider’s glimpse into the brutal world of Russian rhythmic gymnastics in Over the Limit (2017), revealing a culture of relentless verbal abuse, severe weight restrictions, and indifference to injury while documenting the rise of seventeen-year-old Margarita Mamun to fame at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro. But the problem of child abuse is rampant in elite sports worldwide. Eating disorders are normalized at the Prix de Lausanne — the world’s most prestigious ballet competition — which has a health policy that states “The boundary between a fixation on one’s own level of leanness and anorexia is very subtle,” citing a study that shows seventy percent of dancers consume less than eighty-five percent of the Recommended Dietary Allowance of calories. The study obviously suggests most dancers exhibit disordered eating, but the Prix permits dancers to restrict their calories so long as they are only “underweight” or “seriously undernourished” but not “extremely seriously malnourished” according to a BMI chart. While many young athletes may be naturally thin, they are pushed to extremes by adults who frame disordered eating as “discipline.”
Despite Russia’s reputation for imposing near-impossible weight standards on athletes, the demand for extreme thinness in elite sports has its roots not in Soviet-style discipline but in the 1960s United States. George Balanchine, then the director of the New York City Ballet, exhibited a preference for an emaciated look among his dancers that would leave its mark not just on the world of ballet but on elite women’s sports worldwide. Though he may have been considered the greatest choreographer of the twentieth century, behind the scenes Balanchine was a tyrant. Gelsey Kirkland, whom Balanchine invited to join the New York City Ballet when she was sixteen, claims in her autobiography that he rapped his knuckles against her chest and told her he wanted to “see the bones.” Her account is substantiated by other dancers who reported Balanchine groomed and preyed upon teenage girls, forced them into eating disorders, doped them with cocaine to improve their performances, and punished them if they rejected his sexual advances by withholding coveted roles.
There is an assumption in elite sports that thinner is better. This assumption turns young women’s talent, ambition, and love for sport against them, and all too often they are blamed for their self-destruction. In fact, where there are eating disorders, there are typically other forms of ongoing abuse, and these abuses are normalized and even rewarded when they are inflicted by adults. Tutberidze received the “best teacher” award from the ISU. Thomas Bach awarded Irina Viner the Silver Olympic Order for her “outstanding achievements in global sports,” even though she admits she has never been a gymnast or participated in any sports herself. George Balanchine’s ballets were celebrated in their time and continue to be performed today.
Some are beginning to rethink old ways. Artistic gymnastics — a sport that the U.S. dominates, whereas Russia excels at its rhythmic counterpart — has undergone major cultural changes since the indictment of Larry Nassar, who sexually abused hundreds of gymnasts under the guise of medical treatment. As Nassar’s trial spotlighted sexual abuse rampant within the sport, it also surfaced other abuses that USA Gymnastics had for decades willfully overlooked: coaches who psychologically abused athletes and forced them to train and perform through injuries; comments about girls’ weight that led them to develop eating disorders; and a rigid culture of compliance that made speaking out against mistreatment next to impossible. This long-overdue reckoning has forced coaches, athletes, and officials to question whether younger gymnasts are necessarily more capable than their adult counterparts, or if that is an assumption borne from a culture of abuse. After all, children are far less empowered to demand respect than their adult counterparts.
Luckily for those of us who love women’s elite sports but don’t love child abuse, it seems artistic gymnastics is finally asking the right questions. It turns out that part of the reason gymnasts believed for so long that girls were preferable to women had to do with a lack of investment in women’s professional sports in the United States. The Soviet Union in the 1950s invested in women athletes as if they were equal to men. The average age of a woman gymnast at the 1952 Olympic games was twenty-eight. The U.S., by comparison, cut corners by sending talented girls whose parents subsidized their gymnastics training to the Games. Eventually the USSR caught on to the idea that children could be trained from a young age to become Olympic champions. Children from both countries were pushed to greater and greater extremes while supplanting adult women’s role in the sport. Now, gymnasts wonder if restricting the Olympics to adult competitors might force coaches to see the goal of elite training as a long career rather than winning a gold medal before graduating high school. Puberty would be seen as part of the journey, not a problem to overcome.
Chellsie Memmel, a former Olympic gymnast and 33-year-old mother of two, recently made a comeback in the world of artistic gymnastics. Since she returned to the sport of her youth, she has found herself able to master new skills — like the Amanar vault — that were too difficult for her in her youth. “I am just hitting every little thing I am trying,” she said to reporter Lizzie Feidelson of the New York Times two months before the 2021 summer games. Though she has yet to compete in another Olympics, she posts regular progress updates to her YouTube channel, which has more than 35,000 fans. She hopes to show the world that there’s another way to train — one where adult women can be celebrated in gymnastics, and children don’t need to be abused to achieve their dreams.
It’s unclear whether elite sports, as a whole, are at a turning point. As the abuses inflicted by elite sports coaches are being revealed in real-time, sparking discussions on social media and prompting the president of the International Olympics Committee to take a stand against unacceptable behavior, will we finally see trainers treat young athletes with respect, balance discipline with concern, and care appropriately for their health? Part of the appeal of sports like figure skating, ballet, and gymnastics is how graceful, powerful, and dignified their athletes appear. It’s about time coaches help young athletes feel that way about themselves, too.
