Is entry level artistic harder than elite level rhythmic? Both require great deals of strength, flexibility, endurance, coordination, agility, and confidence. However, rhythmic has more coordination with apparatuses, flexibility, spins, pivots, artistry, leaps, and group coordination in the group exercises. How do you train? I train six days a week, five to six hours a day. Training usually starts with ballet, and moves through strength training and practicing my routines.
The most common injuries in rhythmic gymnastics are overuse injuries to the back, knee, calve and foot. Overuse injuries are often caused by a poor balance between training and recovery, as well as a lack of strength and control.
The other gymnasts I competed with were nice white girls from middle-class families that did not resemble my own. They were friendly, but we were not friends. I absorbed, like many immigrant children, a latent awareness of my difference, and thus a thirst to gain what others did not appear to need to fight for — acceptance.
I was the proverbial contestant in the reality television show who was not here to make friends. I was here to win. And there was never a boy. Boys did not magically rearrange the world to make it look more beautiful and more true. Boys did not get you written about and photographed for the local paper.
Medals did. I was in a battle against time: my body was fast on its way to being too old. I was in a battle against myself: each gold medal was a challenge issued by myself to keep up this streak.
To an outside observer, I was a little girl in a sparkly leotard throwing a hoop back and forth, but in reality, my life in rhythmic gymnastics felt less like a sleepover-friendly teen drama than one of those hardboiled stories about a steely renegade on a single-minded quest — usually a man, hardened by middle-age, gripped by an obsession so pure and powerful that it alienates everyone around him.
At nine years old, I was that man. On the first day, the gigantic Auckland arena was teeming with activity. Artistic gymnastics and trampoline competitions were held simultaneously, and a bang of the vault or a thundering rush of applause would bleed over into the already humming rhythmic gymnastics zone. It felt like attending a mildly out-of-control party full of inordinately flexible people. And there, on the rhythmic gymnastics mat, I soared. My scores broke national records.
I came first in every equipment category in my age group. During the prize-giving ceremony, a disembodied voice from a microphone echoed round the arena, announcing the results for my age group. To me, it was something like the voice of God. I climbed on to the top podium trembling with glee. My head was dizzy with excitement; I lost myself in the applause of the crowd. I knew even then that tomorrow the cycle would begin again — the hard-knuckled training, the battle against the ravages of time, the fear that any moment my winning streak might end.
At the top of that podium, I felt loved, perfect and immortal. T he better I got, the longer the journey to training. After the national championship, I moved to a new club that would prepare me for international competition. On the new hour-long drive, we would pass my old club on the way to the Auckland harbour bridge. Every time we crossed the bridge, I would turn my head to look at the towering blocks of the city we were leaving behind, slowly disappearing across the glinting blue-green sea.
I was now the youngest in a group of teenage girls who were occasionally distracted by the teenage boys who trained in artistic gymnastics on the other side of the gymnasium. I would watch my teammates pass them notes and linger for a chat in the hallway. But as I stretched in my hypersplits, obnoxiously convinced that boys were for other people who did not have my iron discipline, I felt very old.
The prospect of ageing weighed heavy. The trouble would come later, when puberty threatened to slow down my metabolism and render my body unsuitable for uninhibited jumping and spinning and running. The horrifying prospect of growing breasts hung over me like a dark, hideous cloud.
At this club across the harbour, the aura that surrounded gymnastics in my mind began to fade a little. Gossip and drama crept in, and I started to sense that lurking in the corners of this beautiful thing I loved lay hints of violence. In recent years, abuse in gymnastics has been well documented.
Last August, New Zealand website Stuff published an investigation into the allegations of psychological and physical abuse of former artistic and rhythmic gymnasts. Athletes told stories going back to the 90s about having their bags searched for food, their bodies criticised and injuries ignored.
Many alleged that they had been psychologically abused by coaches. In , the US gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar was convicted of abusing at least gymnasts over several decades; in February this year, 17 British gymnasts began a legal case against British Gymnastics over alleged physical and psychological abuse.
Competitive sports lock you in a small world. For every jubilant victory, there are many heart-shattering lows: failing to catch your equipment, injuring yourself in training, trying your best but just not being good enough. But the buzz of competitive sports comes precisely because the sport, for those in it, is the whole picture. It is the source of your identity, the focus of your dreams.
It is why, in far too many cases, abuse will be quietly tolerated or ignored. A lot of harm can be done by those in power when a world narrows like that. Add to that the fact that many of these athletes are young women who have likely, as I did, gone into the sport early on in their lives, and you get a setting ripe for cruelty. M y first, and last, international rhythmic gymnastics competition came in the summer of , when I was I boarded a flight with other gymnasts from my club and our parents, excited for what was to come.
On the day of the event, athletes from all around the world piled into the stadium. I watched the two gymnasts from Russia nervously, and began to feel very small. Would my national champion trophy count for anything here? I performed my routines the best I could. But halfway through one, a knot formed in my rope. I decided to smile through it. Afterwards, I discovered that the points I received for the movements I did after that were not fully counted, because I had done them with a misshapen rope.
I got a terrible score. I won a bronze for the ball, but did not place for my other routines. It was the same result as my first competition. Then, I had been delighted. Now, I felt heartbroken. Like a teenager experiencing their first breakup, I fell into an existential tailspin.
What was all the point of this? What was the point of life? All I could do was endlessly replay my split-second decision not to untie my rope, stewing in self-hating regret.
The glow was gone. The world of rhythmic gymnastics, which had once shone to me in rainbow-bright hues of leotards and the glittering gold of trophies, faded to grey. Perhaps it was because of my defeat, or because I was growing older, but life felt more difficult after that.
While I still loved being on the gymnastics mat, I was starting to realise how much was beyond my control. Despite the delay in skeletal maturation, genetic predisposition of growth is not only preserved, but even exceeded. Abstract Rhythmic gymnasts performing under conditions of high intensity are exposed to particularly high levels of psychological stress and intense physical training, factors that can contribute to the observed delay in skeletal maturation and pubertal development, and alter optimal growth.
Publication types Case Reports Clinical Trial.
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