Most tweenagers have an obsession. Mine was gymnastics.

I trained and competed with a club team in Hartland, Michigan. I read each issue of International Gymnast magazine cover to cover over and over and over again. I watched my taped-from-live-TV VHS tapes of international competitions so many times that now when I watch, say, the 1992 Olympic all-around competition (thanks, YouTube) I recognize every trick, pose and bobble, and I can say some of the commentator’s lines along with them.

I loved going to practices so much that a little thrill of nervous excitement went through me on the way to my gym, housed in an elementary school, every time.

Then I quit. I picked a day – I think it was in January – that would be my last practice at the gym. I went through the three hours as usual. Only at the end of practice did I tell my friends and coaches that I would be leaving. I cried as I did my last routines on my favorite balance beam, our gym’s Spieth Anderson (its leather cover less squishy than the other two) and then all the way home, but I never doubted my decision.

Gymnastics was a girls’ sport and I knew I was too old for it. I was 15.

I lost touch with the sport. After watching the gymnastics competitions of the next few Olympiads with interest, I missed out almost completely on London 2012 and Rio 2016. I saw the name “Simone Biles” for the first time on a grocery store newsstand in Ithaca, NY; I thought, wow, a gymnast making the front page. Good for her.

I watched highlights of Tokyo in 2021 – I had a newborn at home and what else was there to do after lunch? But it wasn’t until this year, the 2024 games in Paris, when I really paid attention again. It’s almost a different sport.

Women’s gymnastics has grown up and I can feel it in my bones.

The vault shape has changed, from a narrow “horse” in the 1990s to a wide table – a much safer platform.

The scoring system is different, from the 10 point maximum judges used to deduct from to a 15 point algorithm of positive element values vs. mistake subtractions that kind of makes my head spin.

Speaking of head spinning: in a revolution led by Simone Biles, the gymnasts now move so much faster and in such complicated patterns, I barely recognize what they’re doing.

And this is all in entirely different bodies. Yes, gymnasts themselves have changed. This is the part I can feel in my own muscular legs and butt.

When I was a gymnast, “gym pixie” was the gold standard. Elite gymnasts were skinny, tiny and most clearly prepubescent. The older TV broadcasts even listed their weights along with their ages (usually 14-18) and nationalities. This expectation that you’re over when you reach 18 years of age or 100 pounds, whichever comes first, trickled down to the amateur ranks like my little gym.

An ambitious coach had swooped in and done some great things for the gym, growing it in a few years from a community education class to a competitive USA Gymnastics center. But he also instituted a culture in which the “rug rats,” as he called the fifth-grade prodigies, had promising futures in the sport while the rest of us…well, we could hang in with the five-a-week, eight hour a day all summer long gymnastics camp as long as we wanted, but we were clearly not the priority: We were too big.

At 5’ 2” and about 95 pounds I was over the hill. I was also aware that there were other things to life and that I’d gotten too late of a start to make it anywhere near the top of gymnastics. I’m proud of my 15 year old self for walking away from a sport I loved so much.

I never questioned my decision. Instead, played on my school volleyball team, ran hurdles in track, did one season of cross country, played small roles in school musicals. Spent a lot of time with my friends. Normal stuff instead of living in the gym, quitting school for tutors, moving to Texas to train with Bela Karolyi. Those options were never in my universe, but this seemed to be the path for elite American gymnasts: give up everything, delay puberty, clamber for the fickle attention of a powerful father figure, try to shine until your time runs out.

One gymnast from my 1992 Olympics tapes defied this early sunset pattern: Oksana Chusovitina. An Uzbek gymnast, she competed for the Unified Team of former Soviet states during those games…then kept on competing and competing and competing. She had a child, then went back to the gym. When I learned about her, it blew my mind. My expectation was so, so deep that full grown women could not compete in gymnastics. (She qualified, at 48, for the 2024 Paris Olympics but didn’t compete because of injury.)

Another thing that opened my eyes to gymnastics after gymnastics: the Cornell University college team. Living in Ithaca, I would drop in to watch a home meet or two every season, and I loved it. Women’s college gymnastics is a different planet than the ultra-serious world level stuff I’d watched on TV. It’s LOUD and raucous, very team oriented. Some gymnasts specialize in one or two events. There are sparkles on the leotards. The skill levels in the Ivy League aren’t as high as the PAC Ten or Big Ten, but they do some amazing stuff.

Still, even the best women’s college gymnastics teams were considered a step down from world-class– until now.

Three of the five gymnasts who made the Olympic team (Jade Carey, Jordan Chiles and Suni Lee) competed for universities – Carey said it made her a stronger competitor. Of course the backbone of the team was Simone Biles, 27, who as a grown woman is on top of her sport. She’s a phenom, sure, but she’s also a great example. You get a sense that Hezly Rivera, the youngest and perhaps least foregrounded member of “the Golden Girls” team is, at 16, still on her way up – not starting her descent. She could still make it onto two or three more Olympic teams.

Gymnastics is in my past. I love the sport, but it recedes further from my experience with every Olympiad. Now I’m more interested in distance running, which has been growing up some, too. And I’m growing with it.

I’m in the amateur wing of a special cohort – women who have had babies and keep running at the same level, or even get faster.

Allyson Felix (nine-time Olympic medalist) created an outcry in 2019 when she reported in the New York Times that Nike wanted to pay her 70% less because had a baby.

“If we have children, we risk pay cuts from our sponsors during pregnancy and afterward,” she wrote. “It’s one example of a sports industry where the rules are still mostly made for and by men.”

The column triggered a congressional inquiry and led to Nike announcing a maternity policy for its athletes.

Elle St. Pierre’s sponsor, New Balance, has taken a hint, including her one-year-old, Ivan, in the sponsorship plan (unofficially, I’m sure). He wore baby NB gear during the U.S. Olympic Trials, where his mom won the 5,000 meter title. Joining her on the track afterward, he made her win look that much more impressive.

It’s NOT crazy for a female athlete to want to live a full, mature life and also compete at the top of her sport. In fact, the Olympic champion Golden Girls gymnastics team and Elle St. Pierre and many others are proving that it’s not just not crazy; it’s eminently possible.  

Addendum

For every aspiring young gymnast who is not adulting, there are parents who are, big time. My gym was a 40 minute drive from our home…and nearly an hour from my high school, where my mother worked. Both my parents put major miles into their cars and hours on the road just to get me to the places I wanted to go.

I remember being driven home from one evening gymnastics practice by my father. It was winter, it was dark. It must have been past 8 p.m. and I hadn’t eaten for hours. We stopped at a Burger King off US 23. He bought me a chicken sandwich of some kind. Delicious. I can almost taste the sauce on the lettuce still. I don’t think Dad ordered anything, but the spontaneous purchase had a wink from him, sharing the love of the occasional fast food or pizza diversion from an otherwise very healthy diet: Gymnastics coaches on one end, Mom on the other – we’re stopping for BK in between.

My dad was there for my first gymnastics meet, at which I won nothing. He talked me through my severe disappointment. He was there at many later meets when I did win things, capturing many moments with his camera. And of course, there was all that driving.

For a young athlete focused on improving and winning, the parental support system fades into the background. It’s only now that I see how much both my parents sacrificed – time, money, energy – so I could do this thing I wanted to do as long as I wanted to do it. Perhaps they breathed a sigh of relief when I quit gymnastics, but I never felt an ounce of pressure.

We lost my Dad in late July, rather suddenly. You’ll see his comments on previous posts on this blog – but his comments and consistent encouragement are among the very least things I miss about him. This entry is dedicated to him – my father figure who was kind, enthusiastic, generous, wise and above all, loving.