Perfect 10
There’s a lot more to women’s gymnastics than the Olympics
April was the month that the internet discovered women’s college gymnastics. It began when the blog Total Sorority Move posted a video of Louisiana State University junior gymnast Lloimincia Hall performing a floor exercise in a January meet against Alabama. In front of a raucous home crowd, the 21-year-old scored a perfect ten for her dynamic tumbling, exuberant expression, and aggressive yet engaging dance. (And a little “Drumline” at the very end for good measure.)
From the sorority-sphere the three-month-old routine went viral, spreading through the rest of the internet and beyond—Buzzfeed to Jezebel to Good Morning America.
The sudden explosion of Hall’s routine was a bit of a puzzler for college gymnastics fans. Why this routine? Why now, months after the competition? This is not to say that Hall isn’t a worthy recipient of all this attention—she has long been a favorite of the “gymternet” and made a big splash with her floor routine last season, which was heavily influenced by the gospel music of Kirk Franklin and Mary Mary. Hall is the daughter of a pastor and is deeply religious, which is something she hopes to communicate when she performs her floor exercise. (It was her religious sentiment that drove her to post a note on Facebook objecting to Total Sorority Move’s headline —the site had originally called her “the baddest bitch.” After she responded, it was changed to “baddest athlete.”)
While there is often little logic to popularity online (except for cats, a fully understood viral phenomenon), it’s not a mystery why Hall exploded across multiple media platforms last week. It has everything to do with how Hall reverses many of the stereotypes we have about gymnasts. Though short, standing at 4’11, she is not slight. Her musculature is well-defined, especially in her legs, which she uses to launch her somersaults to stratospheric heights. She also dances to crowd-pleasing music, some of which has been plucked from pop culture. The dance moves she selected aren’t out of the typical gymnastics handbook, meaning they don’t come from the European balletic tradition that still dominates in the elite section of the sport. For people who only pay attention to gymnastics during Olympic years, this is huge departure from the young, slight elegant athletes that prance across their screens.
It’s clear from the coverage of Hall’s routine that many people have never thought outside this narrow understanding of gymnastics as strictly an Olympic sport. At the end of the Good Morning America segment, the anchor foolishly asked, “Will Hall ever go for the gold at the Olympics?”
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Hall was never competed as an elite level gymnast, and despite NBC propaganda, the Olympics are not the dream of every little girl who has ever done a cartwheel. In fact, for most of the thousands of gymnasts who compete at high levels in the United States, college gymnastics is the dream. Even the daughter of Mary Lou Retton, the 1984 Olympic all-around champion, is not shooting for the Olympics. McKenna Kelley is one of the best Level 10 gymnasts in the country, just like Hall had been in high school, but she is not on track for Rio in 2016. Rather, she will be joining Hall at LSU in the fall of 2014 to compete for the Tigers. The daughter of an American gymnastics legend knows that there is more to the sport than the Olympics.
In the world of NCAA gymnastics, Hall is not really all that unique. Hers is one of several exciting and entertaining routines that have been awarded a perfect mark during the 2014 collegiate season, which has been pretty 10-heavy. Florida teammates Kytra Hunter and Bridget Sloan each earned a perfect mark on the apparatus, the latter for a routine performed to the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.” (Sloan, unlike most of her competitors and teammates, has actually been to the Olympics—she was a member of the 2008 silver medal winning team in Beijing and was the 2009 world all-around champion.) Michigan senior Joanna Sampson earned the same mark this season on the floor exercise, where she is the defending NCAA champion.
Hall’s body type, as you can tell from the video of Sampson above, is also not anomalous in collegiate gymnastics. She competes in a league of adult women with adult bodies. One of her LSU teammates measures in at 5’9”, which is several inches taller than the average American woman, gymnast or otherwise. The bodies of NCAA gymnasts run the gamut—from petite to tall to slight to muscular—just like the bodies of women in the general population. That these bodies are routinely capable of performing high level skills—two of Hall’s tumbling passes are as good as anything you’ll see in an elite competition—is surprising given what we’ve been taught about female gymnasts—that they’re young, underfed, and sometimes abused. Hall’s braggadocio on the floor sends a different message. But NCAA gymnastics is a different sort of sport.
The traditional gymnastics narrative is one of little girls doing incredible acrobatics. But NCAA gymnasts are women performing athletic feats. They’re less focused on death-defying spectacle than Olympic gymnasts; instead, they want to do their moves as perfectly as possible. They have exceptionally well-trained but variable bodies. And, like other female athletes, they’re often marketed — for better or for worse — not as little girls but as fully sexualized women.
In fact, part of college gymnastics’ extreme rise in popularity is thanks to University of Utah coach Greg Marsden, who used the sex appeal of his gymnasts to boost attendance at meets. Marsden instituted a number of changes to make gymnastics competition faster-paced and more appealing to the public, but none generated wider attention than his 1993 billboard featuring gymnast Aimee Trepanier. Marsden’s team, the Utes, bought billboard space along the I-15 and showcased gymnast Trepanier in a black leotard posing seductively above a phone number to call for tickets. The image is fairly tame by modern standards, but in the conservative state it caused rubbernecking delays. The National Organization for Women (NOW) also registered their protest at the display. The Utes eventually pulled the billboard.
“Ten championships and that was the first time we ever made the front page of The Salt Lake Tribune,” Marsden told Sports Illustrated in a 1996 profile. “The facts are, gymnasts have fantastic bodies and they compete in leotards.” The Utes are known for being among the best conditioned in the NCAA. Marsden figured that would contribute to their popularity, and he figured right.
Despite the objections of NOW and the Tribune, it’s almost a relief to see female gymnasts sexualized—that is, presented as sexual, strong adult women—when the alternative seems to be seeing them as children lacking agency, cowed by overbearing coaches. Putting an underage girl on a billboard is over the top. But many adult women simultaneously flaunt their athleticism and sex appeal, and age-appropriate elite gymnasts have gotten in on the action. In 2011, Olympic silver medalist and world Alicia Sacramone posed for ESPN’s “The Body Issue” when she was 23 and still competitive at the international level.
At any rate, it worked. The Utes routinely set records for attendance at collegiate meets. In 2014, they averaged 14,376 per home competition at the Huntsman Center. This is the highest average for any women’s collegiate sport this year in the country and the fourth time the team has accomplished this feat. High gymnastics numbers is not a strictly Utah phenomenon—Alabama’s gymnastics team came in second in this year’s attendance rankings followed by Tennessee’s basketball team. Other gymnastics teams in the SEC regularly draw several thousand spectators to their competitions every week, which was evident when Hall earned her perfect score.
More than 20 years after Marsden and Trepanier stirred the pot, the current crop of NCAA gymnasts seem quite comfortable presenting a sensual image. This season, UCLA’s Danusia Francis, a British import to the NCAA, playfully teases her hair as part of her choreography (or “hairography”) to Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.”
Of course, sex appeal isn’t the only way for an athlete to please a crowd, and — like football players with end zone dances—college gymnasts get a chance to connect with the audience and show some personality. Unless forced to retire early due to injuries, most college gymnasts compete for four years, which gives them the opportunity to establish rapport with fans. “They may have a signature move and you get to see the same move over and over,” Jessica O’Beirne, the creator and co-host of Gymcastic, a gymnastics podcast, noted. For instance, LSU fans know to anticipate the seat drop move in Hall’s floor routine (which is timed to the start of the “Drumline” part of the music), a move that former Alabama star Ashley Miles used regularly too. Former LSU gymnast Susan Jackson was known for her back headspring. Oregon State’s Tasha Smith used to “take a call” in the middle of her routine.
Elite rosters, on the other hand, are nowhere near that stable. “In elite gymnastics, you never know if you’re going to see someone again,” O’Beirne pointed out. Since 2000, no U.S. women’s gymnastics team has returned an Olympian to the Games. The goal is to wow the judges, not to charm the crowd, which is part of why you’re unlikely to see a routine like Hall’s.
Another reason you wouldn’t see a gymnast such as Hall receive a perfect 10 at the Olympics: Elite gymnastics has eliminated the iconic score. But in the NCAA, 10s still abound and it’s less score than marketing. Fans with painted faces hold up 10.0 placards after seeming flawless routines, demanding a perfect score and sometimes the judges bow to their wishes. That night in Louisiana, Hall could’ve easily scored a 9.9 or 9.95 or a 9.975 for her performance. None of these scores would’ve represented a miscarriage of justice. They all would’ve been as fitting as the 10 she got. That mark she received was more than the sum of the elements she performed and how well she did them. It was the momentum from the previous performers on her team. It was the verve with which she danced. It was the energy of the home crowd on their feet. NCAA gymnastics is, first and foremost, a team sport. That night, Hall’s score was a team effort.
Hall’s routine is great. But she’s not the “baddest bitch” the internet made her out to be. She’s not a departure from the gymnast standard of tiny underdeveloped girls doing ballet moves and Cirque du Soleil stunts — instead, she’s an illustration of the fact that there’s more to gymnastics than Olympics fans ever realized. Hall is a strong adult athlete doing crowd-pleasing work as part of a team, but that doesn’t make her special. It makes her a college gymnast.
For more stories like this one, follow The Archipelago.
