At a weigh-in when I was a high school gymnast, my (female) coach arbitrarily told me to lose five pounds. I was/am 5'6" and weighed about 123 at the time.

Until that day I had given little if any thought to my weight, but suddenly food and eating became fraught with danger and guilt. It was the beginning of an eating disorder that I've struggled with on and off for 30 years.

To this day, I still hover around 123 (thanks to a lot of yoga and strenuous sports) but I still cannot eat a full meal without feeling, on some level, panicky and disgusted with myself. Such a boring thing to be wasting mental and emotional energy on in one's 40s!

Gymnastics was a wonderful experience for me in many ways, but it can really mess with your head. Bad enough that our culture prizes unnatural female thinness and beauty over achievement to begin with. Gymnasts learn that you can't have one without the other.

These days, I like my body most of the time, but I really wish I could be less aware of it. Maybe when I'm 80...

If you have anything at all to hide, you dont dare sue for libel. Even if the specific charge IS libelous, you must testify under oath. None of these people would be willing to do that. Its almost impossible to sue for libel.

There was an abrupt change in gymnastics in the mid 70s-early 80s, with Olga Korbut and Nadja Comaneche (sp?). I remember the Olympics and world-class competitons that were televised BEFORE then, and I also remember many of the girls who competed against those two -- the standard for a gymnast used to be quite different. They were slim, but muscular and many of the girls were in their late teens. It was common to see girls who had nice, curvy, womanly bodies -- even breasts, LOL.

Olga and Nadja were so popular and won so many medals, that both their gymnastics style AND their tiny little girl bodies became the new goal. When they competed against the "old style" gymnasts, it looked like a cute little girl competing against her mom.

It speaks volumes about our culture, that men and women both, we prefer the bodies of tiny lithe little girls to those of sexually mature women. It's about weight, but in some ways the weight is only an issue as weight is correlated with maturity, and what we really despise and don't enjoy looking at is....female maturity. (If you wanted to take it a long LONG way, it's reflective of how we feel nationally about Hilary Clinton.)

The style of the older gymnasts used to be far more graceful and balletic, especially the Russian girls. It was based more on an overall performance style, than the quicker and more trick-oriented style of the newer performers. If you had an old videotape, and could watch Olga Korbut's Olympic performance, you would also see she did a lot of playing to the camera, little-girl, flirtacious gestures.

Many of the same "new style" limitations have affected ice skating competiton -- it's not just gymnastics. Peggy Fleming won the '68 Olympics in a simple homemade dress (very modestly cut) and doing a balletic sort of routine of the kind that wold never even get you chosen to make the team, let alone compete at the Olympic level. Now everything in skating is about triple jumps, the kind that are nearly impossible to achieve unless you are very tiny.

I think some reforms have been instituted -- for example, there is an age limitation, and I think it's 15 or 16 for world class competitions, which automatically limits the tiniest girls.

But is there still a problem? I think yes. Coaches may differ a lot, but there is still an unhealthy emphasis on weight and extreme dieting. It's a super-extreme reflection of the rest of society, where the ability to compete for things like jobs, boyfriends, parental approval, etc. are all closely linked to what women weigh, not who they are on the inside. It's all part of some larger competition, in which the victors are the skinniest -- and the hungriest.

"I saw them as heavy, because the accepted aesthetic was thinner." As if that only applied to gymnastics! I wish!

BTW: Joan Ryan's book (Little Girls in Pretty Boxes) covered this identical issue, and is excellent reading on the subject. She echoed the exact same things as Ms. Sey a good ten years ago.

"Would trade," not "would not trade."

That's not a Freudian slip; I changed it from "I would not trade" to "neither she nor I would trade," and didn't catch that stray "not."

And once again may I ask for the ability to edit our own letters?

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.