Thin ice skaters

[Daygloboo]

I dont know if im right but the ice skaters look painfully thin to me. I remember them looking toned but a healthy weight years ago. John Curry was nicely toned. A lot of them now look far too thin.

I’m so sorry to hear this

😂

Im imagining just a pair of thighs competing in the speed skating with no person attached 😂

Crying and anguished looks???

Of course there, is, its the bloody Olympics, they've trained for half their lives and its a competition with the world watching, what would you do, just shrug and skip off?

My daughter is an elite free and synchro skater and it’s not something I particularly notice. Her former coach made a comment once about how judges would like her as she’s slim with long arms and legs and looks good in her dress. I think it’s moved on since then though (and that wasn’t THAT long ago). I know she sometimes feels self conscious as the dresses are very skimpy. The pairs women are tiny (they haven’t been on yet) but the focus in general is strength and stamina over thinness. This is at a low level elite skater though - national but not Olympic! As for the men falling and crying. They are attempting quad jumps and a quad axel is 4.5 rotations!! They have been training for this full time for years and they have one chance to get it right. Of course they are devastated if they don’t have a clean slate. My daughter is up at 4 every morning to skate before school and this is only a junior level skater. It’s full on’

That absolutely awful. I thought they looked noticeably thinner this Olympics. I wouldn’t normally comment or have noticed. What an absolute shame if they are now encouraging unhealthy practices.

Yes they are all flat chested too (the women)

I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if at least some of them had had cosmetic mastectomies.

I would imagine many of them, particularly the males, are on retatrutide now, which allows you to lose weight easily but maintain muscle mass. Used to be a thing among body builders but escaped containment in the last couple of years

I’m not a skater but I’m a ballet dancer, and the body types are similar. All the best natural ballet dancers were naturally thin and had a small chest, it’s just how it is. Obvs have to be strong too, but they will just have a low body fat %. I’ve not seen any of the skaters look dangerously thin imo, but our weight always had to be on the lower end because it made lifts etc easier

It’s the Olympics. The pressure is insane and takes its toll on even the most mentally resilient. This was also the first Olympics for some of them.

There have also been some issues with the ice since before the games began (one of the test games was delayed due to there being a giant hole in it they were struggling to patch up). There were concerns about the rink not being finished in time for the ice to properly cure before the Olympics, and there have been comments made about it choppy, soft, and unstable since the games opened. That isn’t to say it was the determining factor, but it wouldn’t have helped.

Its really concerning that people expressing perfectly normal and contextual emotions are seen as 'mentally ill' or 'not mentally stable'.

This is why we apparently have a whole society who are suffering with MH issues. They're really not, they're experiencing normal sadness, boredom, anger, worry and the day to day travails of life.

I mention again Piper Gilles posted a day in the life TikTok from the games village where she trained for the day on 2 boiled eggs. That’s 180 calories for a whole day of training. They may be natural slim build but they are restricting eating to be even lighter.

The context, i would say, is that they are horribly thin people on an ice rink. So not really a normal context at all. .

The context is a competition!!! One of the most heightened in the world, its completely normal to be psyched, ups and downs, highs and lows, huge emotions with that, exhaustion, elation, relief.

Watched the pairs this evening and didn't think any of them looked excessively thin. They looked healthy and muscular. The pairs women are petite, but not all by any means have particularly small busts as pp said. Their figures are in proportion.

It's a well known fact that certain coaches demand reducing food intake. There's a group of them originating from Soviet Russia and currently living in Canada/US and they are machines. They've always been, nothing's changed. Some Western coaches followed the same path to be competitive.

This has been going on since forever. Figure skating is rife with ED. It's now coming out other MH issues and SA are also sadly not uncommon.

I think some posters here have no realisation of what the skaters look like in real life, especially female skaters are absolutely tiny. They certainly look bigger than they are on ice.

The only female skater defeating this at the moment is Laurence Fournier-Boudry, but there are other controversies related to her.

I don’t know how tall they are though, if the men are 6ft + it gives the impression of being thinner than someone who has the same frame size but 5’8

Realistically though, if you're going to chuck someone the weight of a person in the air and catch her again, whilst moving on a slippery surface on a knife edge, that's only going to work if she's light.

I think size is contextual and what is healthy for one person is ED in another.
Case in point, a good friend of mine with a long-standing ED has taken up long distance running. She's extremely thin but so are many of her fellow marathon runners, her body looks similar to theirs. For her it's deeply unhealthy, for some of those runners it probably isn't, it's just how the sport has shaped their body.
I'd imagine the ice skaters are a mixture of both, I could imagine some have full blown ED and some just having that body type through the sport or somewhere in between.

It's funny isn't it, how people always mention skaters, ballet dancers, gymnasts etc when talking about being very thin, but nobody mentions (eg) marathon runners or F1 drivers.

People seem to think that it is the activity which forces the elite participants to restrict their diet and be so thin, when it is entirely the opposite, and it is because they are naturally built that way which gave them an advantage over others in the first place.

Wasn’t there the scandal in the last olympics with the very young Russian skater who seemed to be under enormous pressure and there was talk of having an age limit?

and the reason they pick young teens because the physique allows for the quads more easily?

I personally think there should be an age limit at the olympics and where sports are dominated by teenagers there is something wrong

LFB has great muscle tone and looks healthy but still has quite low body fat. I thought some of the pairs skaters looked quite healthy with good muscle tone and body fat percentages.

Singles skaters, especially those doing quads, apparantly feel the load in a big way on their jump landings if they're heavier. Johhny Weir wrote about this in a way that was quite disturbing and he clearly had/has an eating disorder.

There's the old school jump technique that relies on height in the jump, which tends to allow for longer careers for the skaters. There's a Russian skaker (forget her name) that could compete a triple axel no problem into her twenties and has strong legs, vs Eteri Tutuberitze type school that relies on an extremely thin pre pubescent body type that can rotate quickly but without the jump height. This style of training with long hrs and a starvation diet leads to very short careers, brittle bones and injuries.

But the ice dance women are thiner than the pairs women in general and the aren't being thrown or doing the big overhead lifts. I don't see why Piper Gilles can only eat two boiled eggs, hopefully she has a big supper. I've seen shows/articles where ice dancers discuss what they eat and it was a lot more than that.