Former athletes who think anyone cares about what they have to say.

Please, now and forever, never speak/write publicly again.

Also, you're a gymnist. With all due respect, no one gives a shit about your sport.

You did some world class gymnastics for a few years a couple of decades ago, and that gives you the right to denigrate others?

Gymnastics in particular is a sick soup of psychodrama, and you're obviously the kind of arrogant jerkoff who that environment produces.

Here's some of your own crap back at you:

You say you have demons - you don't. You were a privileged arrogant little turd who played at competing but never amounted to much and 20 years later, you're trying to cash in because your life is otherwise bereft of value. You expect us to believe you've really suffered? Not as much as the people around you who had to deal with your petulant entitlement have suffered. That much is certain.

Nobody cared then, and it's certainly too late now for anyone to care. If not for Google and the fact that this is an Olympic year, most people would say "Jennifer Who?"

You're also not a writer. You crap out some whine fest about how hard your life was and that makes you Tolstoy? I think not.

I have a profession that brings in enough money for me to carry on my amateur singing career. I won't ever be a soloist in an opera, but I have given thousands of hours to this, and spent tons of money learning to be a competent choral singer.

Opera doesn't happen if guys like me don't show up to sing and act in the chorus. Symphony orchestras can't perform the Messiah or Beethoven's Ninth if guys like me don't show up to sing.

I know the difference between me and the professionals. They have a brilliant natural gift, and they have put in countless hours burnishing that gift. I don't have the gift at that level, but I, too, have put in countless hours burnishing the gift I have. And many more encouraging kids in my church choir to work at it.

Jennifer, what have you given back to gymnastics?

It sounds like, rather than being an 'elite' athlete, you are actually an elistist, and a snob. There are many of us who never went on to Olympic fame who enjoy sports. We can appreciate the efforts of world-class athletes and the hardships they have endured. We can respect their dedication and drive. But you have just lost any respect that I might have had for you as a person.

May I have my red star now, please?

I competed in a sport at the National level - didn't quite get to World competition, but competed against some who did, and even won sometimes. I wasn't going to make the Olympics, but it didn't mean I didn't dream about it. Now that I'm far past the point of 4-day school weeks because competitions were 3-day weekends, of leaving school an hour early and getting home after 8 at night to then do 4 hours of homework plus makeup work from the day I missed, and all those joys of training with abusive coaches (I can beat your story - one of my coaches HIT my leg after I broke it because I couldn't stand up and keep going), I coach kids when I can (without the abuse, of course). And you know what - I coach at the low level of the sport. And I have to say - I've never cried watching the Olympics but man, every time one of my kids even does well at a competition, whether they win or not, whether they ever have the chance and skill to go even where I did much less the Olympics, I absolutely stand on the sidelines with tears in my eyes and am damn proud of them for participating. And THOSE kids watch the Olympics, and are inspired to reach and try and those kids have every right to say - "I am/was a part of that." Sorry Jennifer - but just because you don't make it to the top doesn't mean you weren't a part of the sport, and don't have the right to cheer and relate.

I wonder what actual writers think of fomer jocks who throw together a few of their personal self congradulatory tragedies into a book and get it published?

You know I saw my waste disposal technition yesterday and informed him I had brought the cans out to the curb, he looked at me with the same disdain, Ms. Sey no doubt has for "arm chair" atheletes, since I had no idea the effort put into the waste management infrastructure in my city. (o.k. that's a made up story, but you get the idea).

We all play childrens games, and a few of us wind up being very good at childrens games, like playing ball, swiming & diving, running around in a circle, jumping and fliping, or even just playing make belive and decide to make that childrens game our career.

We all like to puff up our occupations. Think that no other trained monkey but ourselves could ever possibly appreciate the work we do. In chess, adults who play a children's game very well take on the title of grandmaster, but in the end they're just moving pieces around the board just as I did as the alternate chair on my highschool chess team. Yes they do it phenominally better then I ever could have hoped to, but I make up for it in otherways, and my own experience as a failed amature gives me an even greater appreciation of this childrens game we all enjoy.

To someone who has never jumped in a pool and treded water for an hour strait, it probably looks a lot easier than to someone who even as an amture did the same thing.

These are all children's games we play, even at the elite level, and whether your gold is at the olympics or at the oscars, it's best to keep your self grounded and realize that you were lucky to have the talent and dedication to make it where you did, but that doesn't mean that others who failed didn't have just as much talent or dedication, they just didn't have both in the way you did, or maybe they did but lacked the supportive (or uncarring depending on your point of view) parents that you did.

Besides, who knows, if not for an ill timed fall and broken arm, the author might have gone farther than she did, and perhaps the woman she derided who read her book had a similar occurance just much earlier in her career.