“Gymnasts Are Like Wine, They Get Better With Age”: Becoming and Developing Adult Women’s Artistic Gymnasts

ABSTRACT

Women’s artistic gymnastics is commonly understood to require early entrance and intense training during childhood. Most gymnasts retire before reaching adulthood. In recent years, the gymnast population at the highest level has “aged.” In this article, we adopt a socio-pedagogical perspective to explore the training contexts, pubertal development, and associated learning 10 older elite gymnasts reported. We develop a cultural perspective of gymnast development and show that transitioning through puberty allowed the gymnasts to extend their careers. Support from their coaches and parents, self-reflective time, and genetic predispositions facilitated the transitioning. Through this, gymnasts gained control over self, body, relationships, and performance. In conclusion, we provide implications for gymnast development practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Athlete development
• cultural perspective of learning
• horizons for action
• horizons of learning
• puberty as career transition phase

Notes

1. Examples of such older medal winners are Oksana Chusovitina (Germany/Uzbekistan), who won a bronze medal at the 2012 European Championships at the age of 38; Hong Un-jong (North Korea), who won a gold medal at the 2014 World Championships at the age of 25; Rebecca Downie (UK), who won a gold medal at the 2014 European Championships at the age of 22; and Catalina Ponor (Romania), who won a silver and bronze medal at the 2012 European Championships at the age of 25.