Sporting excellence is worth the "abusive" behaviour it takes to get there - Nadia Comaneci

[Bubblebu]

Saw a newspaper article about Nadia Comaneci and specifically detailing the abuse she and others went through in the 1970s whilst training as a pre pubescent girl to achieve the heights she did.

I am old enough to remember the 1970s as a child and think that the casual attitude to abuse permeated many areas of society. It was not as straight forward as "soviet attitude" or such like.

There seem to be many areas of life now where modern day values and attitudes are applied to decades ago in a retrospective way to condemn past practices.

But where the past practices resulted in undeniable and astonishing excellence do you think they can still be justified in retrospect?

YBU - of course abuse of any sort (including mental abuse) never justfies any outcome
YANBU - no abuse can sometimes be justified depending on the outcomes both for the individual at the time and thereafter

I was a gymnast in the seventies. Nowhere near Nadia's standard of course but on the competition circuit and trained every day for years, had a close friend in the national team. Don't really know what it's like now but what I saw was not so much young girls forced to train (although I guess some might have been) but young girls who were so in love with gymnastics that they behaved like addicts. I knew girls who would train every minute of the day if they could and do almost anything to get a place on a team or gain favour with an influential coach. In that case it was up to the adults in charge to draw sensible boundaries and no, some of those adults definitely didn't. Abuse wasn't necessarily "the norm", but abuse happened.

"Does anyone but the likes of Nadia herself actually get to decide if it is worth it?"

Exactly.

But it does not answer the question that the window in time for her to "actually get to decide if it is worth it" was precisely the same time she was a child training to the peak of her ability / performance and being abused.

I don't think these kids can make a sensible decision when they start training and I think that by the time they are old enough to make decisions, their whole world is gymnastics. Their parents have sacrificed to give them their dream and they have so much pressure to do well.

The BBC currently has a documentary about sexual abuse in football on iPlayer. It has heartrending testimony from several victims explaining how they were so focussed on being a successful footballer, they stayed in the team of their abuser as he got people careers in football.

Yes, many did become Premier League players but at significant cost to their mental health and relationships.

No sport is worth this and children can't make decisions on this, they require strong safeguarding environments created by adults who aren't blinded by sport.

(And yes, the title is misleading, it sounds as if Nadia is being quoted)

The environment of gymnastics is warped tbh. They make their gymnasts feel like it has to be their world and the levels of work and effort is immense. Then the competition of other clubs trainings ridiculous hours (I’m talking a minimum of 18 hours per week for 10 year olds here- how many people would think a part time job for a 10 year old was reasonable?)
The welsh gymnasts I met at a national comp were all homeschooled in order to fit in the “correct” (ie maximum) number of hours. These kids were under 10.
The physical damage is also apparent when you see how many kids have knee supports or ankle support etc and have been seen my physiotherapists etc.
It’s also telling how much the gymnasts I know grew and matured in lockdown... that amount of training must have an impact on young girls growth

It’s never, ever justified. So what if it makes athletes better performers? Since when was that important in the grand scheme of things? It’s just entertainment.

@Isadora2007 my daughter was in the welsh national squad aged 10 a d she was the only one not homeschooled, she was a naturally gifted gymnast- mostly because she had the undiagnosed EDS. So she ‘retired’ aged 12 when the knee and ankle subluxes became too much. I suspect she is not the only one who has hypermobility to some degree but I wasn’t willing to risk my daughter ending up needing a wheelchair for a possible shot at the olympics. Some see it differently and it’s really sad. The entire sport is full of this kind of thing. It’s dangerous.

Don't really know what it's like now but what I saw was not so much young girls forced to train (although I guess some might have been) but young girls who were so in love with gymnastics that they behaved like addicts. I knew girls who would train every minute of the day if they could and do almost anything to get a place on a team or gain favour with an influential coach.

This is an unhealthy attachment style playing out in the context of a sport where it is legitimised as commitment and determination.

It's really sad that people might just look at the surface level and instead of seeing wounded young people, they see 'dedication'.

In the football documentary what I saw was intense vulnerability, probably a lot of ADHD and the 'normal' kids dropping out because lets face it, nothing was worth that.

So you end up with a very highly selected group of intensely vulnerable children.

But when you send a TV camera into a training camp we are told they are dedicated and role models.

thank you for your replies
I will definitely be watching Athele A Netflix as I have not yet watched it.

But I still have just watched olga korbut again on this
and I genuinely think:

• the talent is phenomenal (even more so with the errors in the bars);
• I never once even once thought about what she was wearing. ok I am female but why is this a thing? i admit i would not care what she was wearing so long as it gave freedom to perform;
• it is frankly a breath of fresh air compared with the over sexualised lens of 2021. i dont know but i am sure the commentator was conveying her talent not anything else and that was why most watched.

I still think what was achieved was amazing.

Don't know if you're aware of a website called The Players' Tribune. It's a US site, devoted to providing a space for athletes from a range of sports to write about whatever is important to them, without the filter of an interviewer. Makes for interesting reading in all sorts of areas, but they have a recurring theme about mental health. www.theplayerstribune.com/collections/mental-health-awareness

There's a lot to pick through, and it isn't all related to overly-pressurised childhood training routines, but it does point to a deeply messed-up environment on many levels. And, as a PP mentioned, these are stories from people who made it, who achieved a level of success and fame. Thousands didn't close to this.

I found this one, from an ice hockey player, quite striking (perhaps because hockey is the sport I mostly work in). And not encouraging about what pro sport takes out of people, emotionally: www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/nick-boynton-everythings-not-ok