Little Girls And Gymnastics: What Price Glory?

MIAMI - Susie Kincaid is hardly wider than the gap between her front teeth, but she is counting calories at age 12. To maintain her matchstick size, she tries not to go above 1,500 a day, and during workouts, she wears an elastic "tummy band" to remind her to keep her stomach flat or, better yet, concave.

Her hands are still small, so the skin rips and blisters when she hurls her 85-pound body around the uneven bars. She holds up her palms to show streaks of blood coagulating in the chalky powder. She grins at her badges of courage.

Susie Kincaid is not your typical little girl. She wants to be an Olympic gymnast. School and a 30-hour-a-week training regimen in a gym in Pompano Beach, Fla., take up most of her time. But two weeks ago she spent precious hours in front of the TV, mesmerized by girls not much older than herself, basking in the white light of global love and admiration in Barcelona. As she watched, a thought ran through her mind like a mantra: In four years, everyone could be watching me.

Watching the American girls bow their heads to be draped with Olympic medals made Susie all the more determined to face the countless practices that lie ahead.

Sometimes her feet ache from landing with a thump on the four-inch-wide balance beam. The beam is the scariest event. When she's nervous, she can feel it trembling beneath her. It's four feet off the ground, which means it comes up to Susie's chin.

"When I was 7, I saw a girl fall off and hurt her leg," Susie says. "It was gross. It bent the wrong way."

Susie is working on a vaulting maneuver no one has ever done before - a handspring with 2 1/2 twists. If she succeeds, it will be called "The Kincaid."

There are moments when all the effort catches up with her. She talks about weariness with an adult's sigh. "Some days I go home after workout and tell my mom I feel like I got run over by a truck."

Susie is a smart, articulate girl, with a cute smile that puffs out her cheeks. Her brown hair is pulled back by a ribbon that matches her leotard. Her life is no different from that of thousands of other dedicated girls who aspire to be on TV someday, waving to the crowd from the medal platform, cradling a bouquet.

HOT STUFF

In the Summer Olympics, women's gymnastics takes center stage, much as figure skating does during the Winter Olympics. The men's version of the sport takes a back seat. It's the girls people want to see: leotards and lipstick, spins and smiles, perfect girlish bodies and perfect 10s. There is muscle involved, but beauty, too. Some routines, with certain kinds of music, require flirtatious, Lolita looks from the girls. Brandy Johnson, a former Olympian from Altamonte Springs, Fla., used Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" in one of her routines. At the same time, the 15-year-old carried a white teddy bear in her gym bag.

Consistently high TV ratings prove viewers love to watch the breathtaking mix of strength, grace and sex appeal. But the folks at home don't see the pain behind the ponytails, the humiliation that comes before the hugs.

"People think it's a glamour sport," Johnson says. "But it's really kind of disturbing. A lot of these girls walk away with a lot of problems."

Athletes, artists, business people - all know the painful equation behind success: Sacrifice plus hard work equals triumph. The end justifies the means. Becoming the best is often a Faustian trade-off. German composer Robert Schumann built a contraption above his piano that pulled up his ring finger with a piece of string. The ring finger is the weakest of the five because of the natural construction of the hand. But Schumann wanted to make it more agile. In the process he injured the finger, and had to give up on his goal of becoming a concert pianist.

Athletes routinely push their bodies to the breaking point. At a track meet in May, long jumper Llewelyn Starks' shin bone snapped with an audible crack as he launched from the takeoff board. Larry Bird has to lie on the floor during basketball games to rest his battered back. Runners have been known to hallucinate during the final miles of ultramarathons.

What price glory? It is a question all athletes must ask. But female gymnasts are the only athletes who must grapple with the rise and fall of their careers during the years when other children are finding it difficult enough simply to grow up.

Many people in the sport say girls who master gymnastics are gaining more than they give up - lifelong discipline and the conviction that dreams can come true.

"They are athletes with an unusual integrity," says Bela Karolyi, one of the most successful gymnastics coaches in the world. "They grow up to be strong, sturdy people."

Others - those who have fallen victim to eating disorders, broken bones, burnout, or the short end of the sport's politics - say they would never let their daughters put on a leotard.

Wendy Bruce, 19, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. - frequently referred to as the "old lady" of the 1992 Olympic team - has suffered illness, injury and loneliness in pursuit of the sport she loves. She has been living away from her parents' home since she was 14.

"People see the overall impression, the tricks, the pretty music," she says. "They don't realize how hard we work, how much pressure we're under, how much we give up of a normal life."

THE ROMANIAN COWBOY

One man has set the tone for women's gymnastics in this country: Bela Karolyi. Karolyi defected from Romania in 1981 during a trip to New York, five years after revolutionizing the sport with star pupil Nadia Comaneci, who, at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, scored the first perfect 10.

Karolyi, a national hero in Romania, ran afoul of the Romanian government - then in the orbit of the Soviet Union - when he attacked what he perceived as favoritism toward the Soviets in international gymnastics competition. When he defected on a team trip to the United States, he had only a few dollars in his pocket. He worked as a dishwasher, janitor and dock hand. He learned to speak English by watching "Sesame Street." He now owns three gyms, the base of a gymnastics kingdom that in the last eight years has produced the United States' top gymnasts - Mary Lou Retton, Phoebe Mills and Kim Zmeskal, the first American to win a world championship and a favorite to win the all-around gold medal in Barcelona until she stepped out of bounds in the floor exercise event.

Since coaching Retton to gold in 1984, Karolyi has become an Olympic fixture, a tall man with a bushy mustache and heavy accent, wearing a sweat suit and giving bear hugs to his petite prodigies on international TV.

Karolyi, 49, sleeps from 1 to 5 a.m., and spends 16 to 18 hours a day in the gym. Occasionally, he heads to his 53-acre ranch in the Texas countryside, where he raises horses and cattle, and goes rabbit-hunting. He lives by a simple philosophy: Whoever works hardest reaps the most rewards. The hours - the years - of work pay off in those fleeting moments at meets when the gymnast nails a beautiful routine, gets the Bela hug and steps onto the medal platform.

Karolyi has 500 girls at his gyms. But only the top six - "Karolyi's six-pack" or "Karolyi's kids" - work directly with Bela and his wife, Martha, a former Romanian gymnast considered the world's top balance beam coach. This year's seven-member Olympic team included three Karolyi gymnasts - Zmeskal, Betty Okino and Kerri Strug - and one ex-Karolyi kid - Michelle Campi, who now trains with a former Karolyi assistant in Sacramento. They were good enough to win the team bronze, the only Olympic team medal for American women since 1948, besides the team silver of 1980, when the Soviets boycotted the Olympics.

Karolyi imported the training regimen that has made the former communist bloc countries the dominant force in women's gymnastics. And now, 11 years later, those methods are beginning to pay off in Olympic gold.

THE 50-HOUR WEEK

Training for Karolyi's handpicked six is conducted in a boot camp atmosphere. The girls - who range in age from 14 to 17 - train eight to 10 hours a day, six days a week. They get off Sundays, July 4th, and three days at Christmas.

"Gymnastics is not for fun," Karolyi says. "It is not golf. I believe everything worthwhile is hard. Mildness is not the proper approach. You always have to be demanding, always asking for more. As long as you want to create something better, you have to be hard. If you want to be the best, you have to get the most out of every minute."

Brandy Johnson, now an aspiring actress who does stunt work in Orlando, described a typical day when she was training with Karolyi prior to the 1988 Olympics:

"From 7 to 10:30 a.m. we worked on compulsories. Nobody was late and nobody missed workout, even if you were sick. I had chicken pox once, and Bela said he didn't know what that was. (She practiced.) From noon to 3 p.m. we had dance lessons. And from 4 to 9 p.m. we worked on our optional routines. We were supposed to get out at 9, but he always noticed some mistake so he could keep us until 10."

And in their spare time?

"We mainly slept. I'd get up at 6, and get dressed to make sure I was ready, and then go back to sleep from 6:15 to 6:45. We ate just a little. In gymnastics you don't eat much. Mainly we ran off of our nervous energy, which makes it difficult for your body to recuperate when you're injured."

Some of the girls had tutors at a nearby private school. Others learned through correspondence courses. Johnson remembers teaching herself geometry at odd hours. But there was no question where their primary responsibility lay.

PREGNANT GOATS

Karolyi and the gymnasts loyal to him say his record speaks for itself.

"My goal is to make them sturdy and aggressive girls," he says. "Each child has their own parent. I cannot be responsible for everything in their lives outside the gym."

There are issues inside Karolyi's gym as well. All his gymnasts say he berates them in practice.

"Everybody gets called an idiot," Mills says. "The first time he called me an idiot I phoned my mother after workout, crying. I never let him see me cry, and you never talk back."

In fact, his former gymnasts say, there is no talking, period, during workout, except for Karolyi's voice, yelling out his pet phrases: "You look like an overstuffed Christmas turkey. You look like a donkey. You look like a dead frog. You look like a pregnant goat. You look like you're in the Special Olympics. You are an embarrassment. What are you doing, making fun of gymnastics?"

"I hope they don't feel blame," Karolyi says about his name-calling. "It is only to make them stronger. Competition is tough. Holy cat! Life is tough. They know not to take it personally."

It is survival of the fittest. Karolyi sees himself in the girls he chooses, girls with talent but also girls who have a hunger for 10s, and who always will, even in endeavors beyond gymnastics. The resilient ones develop calluses on their nerves, become unflappable competitors. The sensitive ones drop out or move to a different gym. Even the ones who stay with him seem to have mixed feelings.

"You want to impress him," Brandy Johnson says. "You want the bear hug. You don't want him to grab you by the back of the neck, which is what he does when you screw up."

Some of his gymnasts say that Karolyi has an irascible affection for them. Lighter moments mix with the marathon of intensity. Occasionally, he takes the girls out to his ranch and they stay overnight in the cabins. Johnson once celebrated a birthday there.

"There was a big birthday cake, and we were all eyeing it but trying to ignore it, and Martha said, `Go ahead, girls, eat some cake,"' Johnson says.

GRAVITY

Survey the whole spectrum of sports. Anyone can play a friendly game of touch football, swat a ball casually around a tennis court, toss a baseball, hack at a golf ball. But most people do not have the slightest idea how to attempt a back handspring, let alone three in a row.

"You see Michael Jordan flying through the air, but he can't fly through the air and do what these girls do," says physical therapist Andy Vogel, who works with athletes from all sports. In his eyes, no sport is harder than gymnastics, which requires a rare combination of skill, strength, grace and tolerance for pain. Flexibility is essential for contorting the body into unnatural positions. Gymnasts can bend their backs like a bow and raise and lower their legs like the blade of a pocketknife.

Add to the physical challenges the mental pressure of being judged, on a scale of one to 10, while you're out there all alone, doing flips on the beam. Not only do you have to hit the flips without a bobble, but the judges have to like the way you look, your "lines" - the shape of your body. In international competition, gymnasts are so closely matched that the difference between winning and losing can be one one-thousandth of a point - a toe not pointed, or an ounce of fat in the wrong place.

Weight control is as important for gymnasts as it is for models. Except that gymnasts are usually five feet or shorter, meaning the pounds show more. And gymnasts reach their prime as teen-agers, when the body is growing - in all the wrong places if you want judges to see your "lines" rather than your curves. Weight also shifts a young girl's center of gravity, makes injury more likely, and makes those lightning-quick twists and flips harder to execute. Height makes tumbling more difficult.

Karolyi says the ideal size for a gymnast today is 4-foot-7 to 4-foot-10, 75 to 85 pounds. "You look at the parents, especially the mamas, and you can tell who will be small," he says.

Gymnasts find themselves racing against a biological clock. They are butterflies flitting through a small window of opportunity: One Olympiad. By the time they're 17, 18, 19, they're getting old. As they grow more beautiful, less boardlike, their gymnastics careers shrivel.

Susan Stokes, mother of one-time Olympic hopeful Erica Stokes, is relieved to see her daughter retired at age 16. Erica trained with Karolyi for three years before suffering foot and shoulder injuries. She was demoted from the elite six. She and her family moved to Oklahoma City, where there was another top-flight gym, in an attempt to come back in time to make the Olympic team. Erica is tall for a gymnast, five-foot-two, and while she was injured, she'd put on weight.

Last December, Susan Stokes came downstairs at 2 a.m. and found her daughter in the bathroom, throwing up.

"She had bought chocolates as Christmas presents for the other girls, and had eaten them all," Susan says. "She broke down and told me she had been bulimic for over a year. It started when she was first injured. She figured that no matter how well she did her routines, unless she could somehow get down to 90 pounds, she'd never make it. She'd be a `pregnant goat' instead of a maturing young woman.

"I decided then and there that the price we were paying was too high. We gave it up. We moved back home with our emotional scars."

Erica, 16, has been seeing a psychologist. She's better now, as a 120-pound cheerleader for her high school.

"But she's still very concerned about her body," Susan Stokes says. "One day she'll panic about overeating and the next day she'll fast."

Kristie Phillips was on "The Tonight Show" at age 14, being touted as the next Mary Lou Retton. She never even made the 1988 Olympic team. While at Karolyi's, she said she took laxatives and diuretics to maintain what she considered the ideal weight of 92 pounds at the twice-weekly weigh-ins.

"I was called an overstuffed Christmas turkey," says Phillips, now a Louisiana State cheerleader. "I felt like a failure because I was fat. These are things that stay with you, maybe forever."

Karolyi denies that he forces girls into eating disorders. He says nutrition is stressed. "I do not make their menus," he says. "Yes, body style is important. But I am not there making their meals for them."

A WHALE OF A TIME

More than 200,000 girls participate in gymnastics in the U.S. For most of them, and for most young athletes, sport is a confidence-building, healthy experience. But Mike Donahue, president of the United States Gymnastics Federation, says he is aware of the problems at the world-class level. The USGF has started a coaches' education program so "you don't just put a girl on a scale; you learn how to watch for signs of anorexia, you know something about child psychology."

Still, Donahue says, not all of the criticism at the elite level is deserved. Jealousy is at the root of it, he says.

"It's ironic that the kids and coaches who didn't make the Olympic team are the ones with bad things to say," he says. "The good things about gymnastics - the joy of competition, of making friends, of accomplishing goals - outweigh the bad things."

With some exceptions, Karolyi's stringent methods are emulated among coaches producing serious Olympic contenders.

One of those exceptions is Tim Rand, who, with his wife, Toni Rand, runs the American Twisters Gymnastics Academy in Pompano Beach, Fla. "In this country we have a problem always telling people what they did wrong instead of telling them how to do it right," Rand says. "I have no objection to hard work. But with these kids, who are as eager to please as puppies, I think positive reinforcement is more effective. At some gyms, they're not bringing up children, they're producing machines."

Rand says that unlike most serious coaches, he takes pride in blending success with fun.

But even Rand is not above using invective to motivate little girls. The difference, he says, is: "I know whom I can call Shamu, and whom I can't."

Rand consistently develops top-level gymnasts, and the gym is filled with trophies almost as tall as the athletes. But he has yet to coach an Olympian. Two girls who went to Barcelona - Wendy Bruce and Michelle Campi - are South Florida natives. When they began to show Olympic potential, their parents shipped them off to more prestigious gyms.

Michelle's mother, Celi Campi, explains why her daughter switched coaches: "There are the `fun' gymnastics coaches. That's the American way. But it won't make us competitive with the Russians. I'm not saying Michelle never has fun, but if you ask her the best part about gymnastics, she won't say it's all the fun that she has."

CUTTING TO THE BONE

Whether achieved through shouted epithets, or encouraging words, training for Olympic-level gymnastics can lead to trouble. The strenuous exercise and emphasis on low body fat can actually delay the onset of puberty and disrupt menstrual cycles. Brandy Johnson, for instance, says she had no periods while she trained at Karolyi's. Kathy Johnson, a 1984 Olympian, did not start menstruating until age 25. Recent studies show amenorrhea - irregular or non-existent menstrual periods - can cause long-term bone damage or the early onset of osteoporosis. The eating disorders that often accompany amenorrhea can cause thyroid problems, anemia, fatigue and, in extreme cases, cardiac arrest.

"Amenorrhea leads to low estrogen levels and low bone mass," says Dr. Barbara Drinkwater, of the American College of Sports Medicine. "This is occurring at a time when these girls should be maximizing their bone mass. We don't know if they'll catch up, and we won't know until they're in their 40s and 50s."

Says Susan Stokes: "Since these girls don't menstruate, they don't develop until after they quit training. Look at Kim Zmeskal and Betty Okino. They have no chests. My daughter wonders where her hips and breasts are."

The trend in gymnastics is toward compact and powerful bodies - like Zmeskal's - and away from tall and elegant bodies - like that of retiring Soviet star Svetlana Boguinskaia, "the Byelorussian swan," who is 19 and a womanly five-foot-four. Despite her striking beauty and grace, Boguinskaia finished a disappointed fifth in the overall competition, behind the younger, smaller competitors.

Unified Team Coach Alexsandr Alexsandrov calls the new crop of competitors "midgets," and hopes it represents a temporary phenomenon. But Karolyi says the shorter, stockier gymnasts have the laws of physics on their side.

"It's not really women's gymnastics anymore," says Phoebe Mills, a bronze medalist on the beam in 1988. "It's children's gymnastics. You don't see as much grace and beauty anymore, but more of who can do the hardest tricks. It's lost some of the aesthetics. I think that's kind of sad."

There is another reason gymnasts don't last much beyond 17.

"As they get older, they get minds of their own," says Coach Rita Brown of Brown's Gymnastics in Altamonte Springs, Fla.

Johnson and Mills remember lying in bed at night, talking dreamily about discovering a normal life after the Olympics. "We talked about going home, going to school, having dates, going to the prom," Johnson says.

But when the girls do return to the mainstream, the transition can be rough, like someone going to a cocktail party after years on a desert island.

"As a rule, gymnasts are very intelligent girls," says Susan Stokes, whose Houston household was always filled with gymnasts boarding there while they trained at Karolyi's. "These kids can make international plane connections, make overseas phone calls, talk to the press. But they're socially stunted. They're not thrown in with the normal teen population."

Michelle Campi's mother has heard the criticism about gymnasts' lost childhood, and doesn't buy it. She moved her daughter from Broward County, Fla., to train in Houston at age 12.

"When you're on the road up, you get a lot of raised eyebrows," Celi Campi says. "You hear the comments, `Your daughter doesn't get to go to high school football games.' Frankly, when I go to a mall and I see kids sitting around smoking cigarettes with their hair teased up to here, I know Michelle hasn't missed out on anything.

"There's no comparison. She's 15 and already been around the world."

PIXIES, OR LINEBACKERS?

In gymnastics, the real question is not if an injury will occur, but WHEN.

For Brandy Johnson, it was age 10 - a dislocated kneecap and broken finger. By the time she retired at 17, she had broken her ankles three times each, all the toes on her size-3 feet, and her collarbone. She has a metal screw in one big toe. She has three different hip problems, including stretched ligaments that allow the ball to slip out of the socket.

"After a while, warning lights were going on all over my body," she says.

Phoebe Mills' worst injury was a cracked heel. She had been trying an innovative move on the uneven bars and kept swinging around and hitting her heel on the bar, over and over, for weeks, until it finally broke. She's also suffered "a broken wrist, a few broken fingers, a toe or two," she says.

Wendy Bruce's career was waylaid for almost a year because of an array of injuries that included a dislocated shoulder, hyperextended arm, torn foot muscles, chipped bones in the ankle and torn knee cartilage, for which she's had two operations.

Olympian Betty Okino missed 10 months of competition because of stress fracture in her spine, which sometimes made it uncomfortable to sit.

"A dismount from the beam generates force equal to six times these girls' body weight," says Dr. Lyle Micheli, a pediatric orthopedist at Harvard Medical School. "You can have long-term wrist problems; it becomes painful to turn a key in a lock. You can have stress fractures in the lower back, and if they're not discovered early, you could need surgery.

"In terms of injuries, gymnastics is right up there with pro football. As sports becomes more sophisticated and our training becomes more intense, we're flying blind on the aftereffects. We train and train a kid until she gets hurt or until she stops improving."

LITTLE GYPSIES

Wendy Bruce has lived with six different families since she left her own at age 14. She didn't always get along with her surrogate parents or siblings in Altamonte Springs, so she moved a lot, from one awkward situation to the next.

Wendy's parents, Virginia and Fred, sent Wendy upstate so she could train at "a club with clout."

They thought they could visit their homesick daughter every weekend. They put 26,000 miles on their car the first year and often slept on the floor of the bedroom where Wendy was living. The second year, the visits "became every two weeks." Then even less than that. It was hard on the family, but, Virginia points out, not as hard as it might have been. She counts off on her fingers the families she knows where mothers followed daughters to different cities and the marriages ended in divorce. She needs both hands.

Then there are the kids who go so far from home their parents can afford to visit only a few times a year. Or parents who uproot themselves, find new jobs in the cities where their daughter trains, only to have her not make it.

Virginia considers her family lucky because they never had to move to find that extra edge for their daughter. But there were plenty of other sacrifices.

To make Wendy an Olympian, the Bruces took out two $5,000 loans; got three second $30,000 mortgages on their modest Fort Lauderdale house; acquired eight credit cards and routinely used each to its $5,000 limit; paid families $300 a month to board Wendy; spent $10,000 to $15,000 a year on gymnastics. Their sacrifice is not unusual.

"We couldn't paint our house until now, while all the neighbors are on the second paint job," Fred Bruce says. "We had a smashed-in car door for years. We have only one car now, which we share. The Barcelona trip was our first vacation in the 23 years since our honeymoon.

"With Wendy it was like a snowball going downhill, and you just get sucked along."

Was it worth it? Yes, say the Bruces: They got to see their daughter win a team bronze medal in the USA uniform in Barcelona.

But what are the chances that all this investment will pay off in endorsements? Not very good. Unless you are Mary Lou Retton, who not only won the all-around gold medal in 1984, but captured the public's imagination with her dynamic personality and the first American perfect 10, you don't wind up on a Wheaties box.

"Mary Lou was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon," says Nova Lanktree, a director of Burns Sports Celebrity Service in Chicago. "Gymnastics stars are adorable, they're amazing, but they don't have big appeal in advertising because they are only in the public eye a short time. Come September we'll forget most of these names."