Another good question is, why do women want to watch little girls who were coached by men. It's not male jock culture has any more interest in gymnastics than they do figure skating. If it is really as bad as presented, it's like the coaches are pimping the gymnasts, and the audience are the Johns.

Jennifer Sey makes unwarranted accusations of child abuse, and people are praising her interview.

Hope she gets sued. Wake up, morons.

The injuries come from an excessive reliance on ever more risky tricks, needed in a routine. The sport could, just as easily, focus on grace. When someone does a complicated tumbling run on the beam, she needs a pause to set it up. It used to be, judges penalized those pauses. Award the maximum points for easier moves and penalize pauses and girls will get injured less often.

After all, Ice skating (another judged sport) banned flips and sommersaults as too risky.

the girls who were most likely to win got all the coaching attention and the not so good gymnasts didn't get time on the equipment. Yep, we were pretty competitive.

Also, we had weigh-ins. No comment was made about weight, but the coaches allowed us to create our own pressure. Over 100 lbs was a no-no. I am 5'8" and large boned. No one ever discussed what a good weight for me was. Looking at old pictures of myself, I realize when I was under an 'elephantine' weight of 130, I was too thin. But, the social pressure was to be 100. So even without overt pressure, the issue was there.

I avoided weigh-ins, but the whole thing put me off a sport which I enjoyed and which had made an athlete out of a coach potato.

Particularly with respect to the libel issue. I don't know if anything she's written puts her on the hook legally (I suspect her publishers and editors aren't so naive!) I mean, it's one thing to use the rumor as an example of the environment, but if that's the only point she wants to make, why name the man?

And she seems to toe the line between Memoir and Expose. If it's just a memoir, then describe what happened to you and make it clear that your experience might not be unique. If it's going to read like an expose, you have more of an obligation to look into how deeply these phenomena run and now things might have changed over the years.

I recall that in the past, the Olympics judges docked points off an otherwise well-executed routine on the uneven bars if the performer bounced even a tiny bit on landing. This is ridiculous, because under the laws of physics, momentum doesn't just disappear all at once. It's also ridiculous because it is painful and damaging to the feet, ankles, and knees to land without a bounce. I remember one female gymnast who said that she heard her ankles crunching but endured the pain because that's what it takes to get the high score.

Have the Olympics' rating system finally awakened to the laws of physics and biology, as well as common sense, and stopped docking points for a little bounce on landing from the uneven bars?

If it's so terrible quit.

My daughter, 15, has been competing in gymnastics since she was 10. I do not recognize any of these horrors in her gym. It is not an "elite" gym but they regularly place at NY states competitions, for individuals and their teams, and have their share of 1sts.

Our gym brooks none of this nonsense. Run by a generous-minded and compassionate woman who, day after day, teaches all levels, it has strict rules that govern health and attitude. First, grades are paramount. You can't practice, much less compete, if you do not maintain a B average or better. No exceptions. All injuries require medical follow-up, and there is no "official" or preferred doctor. They even go too far at times: my daughter recently sprained her ankle and is on 6 weeks of just conditioning. For a sprain. I seriously doubt that the football teams in my area require such recovery times.

Even the worst of our region's gyms are nothing like what is described here.

I suggest the difference is community. Don't send your kids to ANY far-away camp or training opportunity that promises results instead of a positive, life-enriching experience for your kids, but better yet, stay in your neighborhood.

Our gym's director, as I say, coaches all levels, but to watch her with the youngest -- kids 4, 5, 6 -- is the real test. The laughter and delight is real, and the patience quotient on any given day exceeds my capacity for the month, easy. It is perhaps the best, simple test: does your coach work effectively at entry level, imbuing a spirit of wonder and fun and accomplishment with the youngest girls? This proves whether they are in it to win, or to develop healthy bodies and spirits.

Almost none of these youngest girls have a destiny that includes gymnastics, but most of them, including overweight, uncoordinated girls with no sense of their physical abilities, come away from their time with her with confidence and energy and pride. At a time when obesity and lethargy are pandemic, let's not disrespect one of the really effective ways to improve girls' lives: a fun, well-run gym.

Some of these letters have a tone which disturbs me: It's risky, so we shouldn't let these little girls do it.

Football is also risky. Football, if you look up the statistics, is very risky - kids are severely injured and even killed, all the time. Coaches at our high school expected football players to play injured - at one point half the team was injured. There was pressure for kids to take steroids. There was pressure to win.

I've never heard a single soul suggest banning football.

Banning cheerleading, however, is frequently discussed. A girl in my city was seriously injured falling from a pyramid; after that single incident, pyramids were banned. The same year a boy was killed playing football.

Some girls - I was one of them - like competing. When I was 13, I was competing at an adult level in another risky sport, horse show jumping. I rode jumpers, not hunters, and once or twice I beat forty-year-old men who had been to the Olympics, and let me tell you, watching them stomp off to the barn cursing at being beaten by a 13-year-old was sweet, sweet, sweet. Yes, I worked my ass off. I spent the hottest summer on record in an unairconditioned barn polishing leather in return for coaching. I rode six hours a day and worked with horses another six hours. I got two concussions, a broken ankle, and once, when a horse stepped on me after I flipped over his neck, a cracked sternum. A friend and fellow competitor had to have her spleen removed and two vertebrae in her neck fused after a particularly bad fall. Neither she nor I would not trade one moment of those days for anything in the world.

Please - these girls are athletes. They should be protected from predatory adults and corporations, but they should not be protected from competing. It's a special kind of cruelty to suggest that "dangerous tricks" should be banned from women's sports.