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ABSTRACT
This article considers gymnastics to illustrate how culture, law, and elite youth sports intertwine, focusing on the recent revelations of sexual abuse. It proposes an intervention based in the work of theorist Joseph Fischel that pushes toward a more robust conception of athlete empowerment. This stance, if more fully instantiated in culture, law, and sports regulation, would have two salutary effects: first, it would acknowledge much more fully the autonomy of young athletes, and second, it could help to create a context in which “predatory” behavior of a variety of types is reframed more simply as wrongful behavior that crosses boundaries of dependence and vulnerability that apply to a variety of situations. By making recognition of problematic behavior more routine, this shift would encourage more active and empowered interrogation on the part of the athlete. It also opens up the idea of injury to encompass more than sexual abuse and seeks to reframe consciousness of injury to incorporate athletes’ experiences.
Acknowledgments
I thank Carol Nackenoff, Libby Sharrow, Maureen McDonald, Shanda Schlagenhauf, Michele Schwartz, and my fellow local team parents for their help in thinking through these issues in scholarly terms and in relation to gymnastics. I especially thank Elspeth Wilson for her excellent insights and feedback. I’m grateful to the World Class Gymnastics Academy and its coaches for the important and positive role they have played in my children’s lives. And, of course, I thank my two gymnasts for introducing me to this world. I take full responsibility for the ideas, analysis, and conclusions expressed in this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Of the 10 girls who competed for that team in that session, five were still competing for that team in the 2017–18 season. Two have changed teams, and three left the sport, one apparently right after that meet. None have qualified elite.
2. See Ryan (Citation1995).
3. Yurchenko-style entry vaults are still widely used in elite women’s and men’s gymnastics, but the current configuration of the vaulting table has made the vault easier to perform with multiple flips and twists. McKayla Maroney and Simone Biles both performed Amanars, or Yurchenko-style vaults in which the vaulter’s body performs two fully laid out flips and two and one-half twists while in the air before landing.
4. The discussion of these high-profile cases should not obscure the steady trickle of lower-profile coaches found guilty of sexual assault, child sexual abuse, and child pornography possession. See, for example, Schuman (Citation2015).
5. The gymnasts involved in this conversation were later revealed to have been Maggie Nichols and Alexandra Raisman.
6. Protecting Young Victims From Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act of 2017 (Citation2018).
7. It’s worth a reminder here that since 2010, in addition to Larry Nassar, USAG has been dragged into acting against award-winning and/or national team coaches Doug Boger, Don Peters, and John Geddert in women’s artistic gymnastics, former men’s artistic national team coach Vitaly Marinitch, and former tumbling and trampoline national team coach George Drew.
8. Data collected through Lexis-Nexis news searches on each individual listed on USAG’s Permanently Banned List as of August 15, 2018.
9. These individuals included one person who was convicted of criminal negligence when a toddler was accidentally shot at his residence with his unsecured gun, but five had been convicted of sex offenses that did not involve minors.
10. A good example is the Tkachev, a release move performed by both female and male gymnasts on uneven bars (women) or high bar (men). Many gymnasts perform the skill in straddle position, which has led to a whole ugly sub-subgenre of pornography featuring head-on photographs of individuals in mid-skill.
11. Recognizing that older athletes often serve as coaches in Olympic and Paralympic sports, the rules allow relationships between individuals who are separated in age by less than three years as long as there is no power imbalance.
12. Jennifer Drobac proposes the alternative of establishing the legal category of developing consent, a more empowering and positive means of expressing adolescents’ position. See Drobac and Goodenough (Citation2015, 480–82).
13. Consider the unique example of Oksana Chusovitina, a 43-year-old internationally competitive gymnast who is currently training with an eye toward the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Her current coach, Svetlana Boginskaya, was her teammate at the 1991 World Gymnastics Championships and at the 1992 Olympics.
14. Fineman notes the importance of dependency and its relationship to care work in feminist theory; dependency is often the principal frame for understanding children and how their rights and needs complement each other. This project, however, resonates more properly in the vulnerability frame. While a minor athlete does depend on caretakers for financial, emotional, and logistical support, the interventions that vulnerability makes into liberal subjectivity are more helpful for theorizing the status of the teenage athlete who is exercising autonomy and some independent judgment.