A year after Jamie Dantzscher made the US national team, a ground-breaking exposé of elite gymnastics and figure skating appeared in bookstores across the United States. Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters could very well have been based on Jamie’s life story. Ryan was one of the first female sports columnists at a major daily newspaper, working at the San Francisco Examiner and later the San Francisco Chronicle. She originally took three months to research the world of elite gymnastics and figure skating for an article she was writing for the Examiner and wrote that she discovered “a story about legal, even celebrated, child abuse.” Ryan then took a year’s leave of absence to write her critically acclaimed book.
First released in 1995, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes exposed the abusive culture within elite-level gymnastics like no work of nonfiction before it. Ryan took aim at the tactics of some of the most high-profile coaches within the sport, including Bela Karolyi, writing that “Karolyi draws the most criticism of any gymnastics coach for mistreating his athletes. Perhaps it’s because he’s the most famous coach and thus the easiest target. Or perhaps it’s because his track record of producing gymnasts with eating disorders is stunning.”
In example after example, Ryan documented how Karolyi’s mental and emotional abuse of gymnasts led to a diminished sense of self-worth for the young women he coached that frequently resulted in eating disorders. Erica Stokes, a former national team member, started making herself throw up at fourteen, around the time Bela Karolyi started calling her “a pregnant goat.” Ryan described Stokes’s experience in her book:
[Karolyi] called everyone names: her teammate Betty Okino was a pregnant spider. Kim Zmeskal was a pumpkin or a butterball, Hilary Grivich was a tank. Erica tried not to take it personally, but the words burrowed into her brain like parasites. She began to see herself as if in a fun house mirror—squat, bloated, grotesque. She tried giving up food altogether, but she enjoyed eating. So she threw up.
An internal USA Gymnastics memo from December 1995, which dealt with recommendations on athlete wellness, noted “that self-esteem in all pre-adolescent and adolescent girls plummets as much as 30% from the self-esteem of girls in elementary school. The majority of competitive and elite athletes are in middle-school and high school.” The girls and young women whom Bela Karolyi was routinely body shaming inside his gym were at one of the most vulnerable times in their formative years.
Little Girls in Pretty Boxes offered a counternarrative to the one commonly associated with the Karolyis. Many of the young women Ryan profiled never realized their Olympic dreams. The Karolyis, long held up as the creators of Olympic champions, are seldom judged by the collateral damage, those who never have their golden moments. Erica Stokes, weakened by bulimia and injuries, quit gymnastics in the run-up to the 1992 Olympics.
By far the most gut-wrenching story in Ryan’s book is that of Christy Henrich. Henrich made the junior national team at age twelve. By thirteen, she was training more than nine hours a day. By comparison, the NCAA limits the time collegiate gymnasts can practice to twenty hours per week, but Henrich’s coach at the time, Al Fong, held weekly practice sessions more than double that amount of time. When a judge told Henrich at a competition that she looked “fluffy” and needed to lose weight, she was crushed and subsequently developed an eating disorder.
In early 1991, Henrich retired from gymnastics, falling short of her goal of competing in the 1992 Olympics. By mid-1993, she weighed around sixty pounds. She’d tried valiantly to continue, fighting through injuries and competing at one point with a fractured vertebra in her neck, but weakened by years of forced starvation and bulimia, she was physically unable to go on. Suffering from anorexia, she continued to deteriorate after leaving the sport and died on July 26, 1994. Henrich had just turned twenty-two.
Little Girls in Pretty Boxes should have led to sweeping reforms within gymnastics, and for a time, it appeared as if it would. Ryan and the book were featured on 60 Minutes, Oprah, The Today Show, and elsewhere. The media was suddenly paying attention to the high price so many young women paid while striving for Olympic glory. The book was even made into a Lifetime movie, but within the gymnastics community it had powerful critics.
Kathy Johnson Clarke, who won a silver team medal and an individual bronze medal on the balance beam at the 1984 Olympics, spoke candidly in the book about her battles with abusive coaches, overtraining, injuries, and bulimia. In the mid-1990s, when Johnson Clarke was working as an analyst for ABC and ESPN on gymnastics broadcasts, she served as a technical advisor on the Lifetime movie and remembers the reaction she received when she called USA Gymnastics, informing the governing body of the sport about her involvement with the film.
“What are you doing? It’s bad for the sport,” she was told. “I remember telling them specifically, that ‘No, Joan Ryan loves this sport so stop making her out to be the bad guy. She’s drawing attention to these things that you want to believe are rare.’ I was never treated the same after. It was as if ‘Oh, you spoke out against us.’”
In reality, little changed within the sport after the release of Ryan’s book, and within elite-gymnastics circles, Ryan herself was treated as an ill-informed outsider. Jamie, who served as a stunt double for the Lifetime movie, remembers her coaches at the time dismissing Ryan and those she interviewed for her book as “losers and whiners.” The tragic irony is that at the same time Jamie appeared in a movie highlighting abuses within her sport, she was being repeatedly sexually assaulted by Larry Nassar, the national team doctor.
When contacted after the Nassar scandal broke, Ryan could barely contain her anger.
“I literally felt fury. Just absolute fury that it happened at all and just the scale of it,” Ryan said.
Rather than ushering in a new era of reforms, the abusive culture within the elite levels of the sport remained after the release of her book, abuses that were once again laid bare through media scrutiny that came with the exposure of Nassar’s horrible crimes. One could argue the culture of elite-level gymnastics worsened in the immediate aftermath of the release of Ryan’s book. By then, the physical and emotional abuse so pervasive in elite-level gymnastics clubs had become normalized. This is the type of setting that would serve as a safe harbor for Nassar for more than two decades.
“The book came out in 1995. They cannot claim they didn’t know about the abusive culture. That’s what makes me furious is that nothing changed,” Ryan said.
To suggest that USA Gymnastics ignored the health and well-being of its elite gymnasts in the interests of pursuing money and medals would be an easy narrative to push. But it wouldn’t be historically accurate. For a time at least, USA Gymnastics offered a well-intentioned Athlete Wellness Program, established even before Joan Ryan’s exposé.
In the fall of 1994, USA Gymnastics was reeling after the death of Christy Henrich. The public perception was that elite-level gymnastics had a problem with eating disorders and that the sport’s governing body had its collective head in the sand. The incoming president of USA Gymnastics at the time, Kathy Scanlan, took over her position soon after Henrich’s death. A short time later, she tapped USAG Vice Chair for Women Nancy Thies Marshall to lead a task force to look at the way the sport responded to the health risks gymnasts faced.
Thies Marshall had been a four-time national team member and, at age fourteen, part of the 1972 Olympic team that included Cathy Rigby. In Scanlan she found a willing partner, someone who embraced the idea of addressing the sport’s problems, such as abusive coaches, overtraining, and eating disorders. The two women would engage one another in many long brainstorming sessions, which led Thies Marshall to believe real changes within the sport were on the horizon.
By the mid-1990s, USA Gymnastics had grown to include more than seventy-three thousand athletes, coaches, and instructors. More than five hundred gyms across the country were registered under the USAG banner, and it fell on Thies Marshall and her team of experts to examine the governing body’s response to what’s known as the Female Athlete Triad. The “Triad” was first described in a 1993 meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine. Young female athletes who engaged in disordered patterns of eating, such as bingeing, purging, prolonged fasting, and the use of diet pills or laxatives, it was determined, were also at risk of suffering from menstrual dysfunction, or amenorrhea, and premature osteoporosis, or bone loss. That trio of health risks—disordered eating, amenorrhea, and premature osteoporosis—comprised the Triad and, at the time, it wasn’t at all clear how many athletes were affected.
Task force member William Sands, then the director of research and development for USA Gymnastics, had conducted an unpublished study of elite gymnasts and found that 28 percent of them suffered from eating disorder problems. Around the same time, a survey of forty-two NCAA gymnastics programs revealed that 62 percent of collegiate gymnasts admitted to engaging in disordered eating.
Dan Benardot knew he had an uphill battle trying to change the mindset within elite-level gymnastics the first time he observed a national team practice in the early nineties in Colorado Springs. It was a five-and-a-half-hour-long practice, and there was no food or water in sight. Benardot, a nutritionist for the women’s artistic program, would serve alongside Thies Marshall on the athlete wellness task force for USA Gymnastics from 1992 to 1996, and more than anything during that time period, he remembers struggling to get coaches to buy into the logic that gymnasts needed to eat more and eat more often in order to perform better.
Benardot explained to coaches that he understood their concerns about weight. It boiled down to simple physics—every pound a gymnast gained in body weight required an exponential amount of power to move it. But Benardot also understood the science of how food is broken down within the body—that blood sugar peaks within the body roughly an hour after food is consumed and in roughly three hours is used up entirely. And that’s for a normal, inactive person. To deny food to a gymnast, somebody training upwards of six hours a day, literally means having a human being running on empty, eating into their muscle mass with each physically demanding routine. Under those conditions, which had become the norm, America’s top gymnasts were wasting away.
“Our interest was: How can we intervene in what is a muscle-losing paradigm?” Benardot said.
Slowly and over time, Benardot got coaches to buy into his logic, to provide small snacks for national team gymnasts every three hours to maintain healthy blood sugar levels. Gymnasts rotated through his lab at Georgia State University in Atlanta for nutritional assessments. But there were limits to how far Benardot’s message spread. He only made one trip, for example, to the Karolyis’ Texas training facility. While he doesn’t recall any direct resistance from the Karolyis, he similarly does not recall the couple embracing his message. Nor did Benardot know that at the same time he was preaching healthy nutrition for gymnasts, Larry Nassar was using food as a weapon, a lure to groom gymnasts at the Karolyi ranch, manipulating them and gaining their trust in an environment where they’d become so afraid to eat in front of their coaches that they had to sneak food into their dorm rooms.
Thanks in part to Benardot’s efforts, the United States wound up with the heaviest women’s gymnastics team to compete in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. The gymnasts were by no means overweight. Their muscle-to-body-weight ratio was just far superior to their competitors in Atlanta, and it showed in their performance and appearance, as Benardot recalled.
“I still remember the coach from Romania coming up to me on the floor and saying, ‘Dan, your gymnasts look like elephants.’ And I said, ‘Well, yours look like cadavers.’”
Benardot wound up with a gold medal for his contributions to Team USA during the Atlanta Olympics. He used to hold it up as one of his proudest accomplishments as a sports nutritionist. Ever since the Larry Nassar case, he’s had trouble even mentioning it.
“I pound my head against the wall and say, ‘What else could we have done?’”