Category Archive: Track and FIeld

Allegations into Illicit Payments: Black Tidings Far From Glad Tidings for Tokyo 2020

Papa Massata Diack
Papa Massata Diack

The recent allegations that payments were made in connection to the bidding process for the 2020 Olympic Games is concerning. In order to understand who, what, where, when and why, I have looked into the reports available on the internet, and have tried to put together a timeline with explanations. I have tried to include links, many of which are from The Guardian, a newspaper based in London.

It doesn’t look good.

  • Sometime between 2010 and 2014: Likliya Shobukhova, a top marathoner from Russia, had paid€450,000 in exchange for covering up doping violations. In other words, Shobukhova was extorted.
  • July 2013: A payment of €1.3 million (USD1.5 million) called “Tokyo 2020 Olympic Game Bid” was sent from a Japanese bank to a bank account in Singapore, under a company called Black Tidings. The Black Tidings account is under the name of a Singaporean, Ian Tan Tong Han, who was a consultant to a company called Athlete Management Services, a company that “was set up to market and deliver the commercial rights granted to it by the IAAF“. According to the article referred to by the link, Tan was very close to Papa Massata Diack, the son of then-IAAF president and IOC leader, Lamine Diack. The article also alleges that Papa Massata Diack was part of an “informal governance system for the IAAF.”  Lamine Diack was a voting member of the IOC during the 2020 Olympic bidding process in 2013, so people can only wonder if the payments had an impact on the vote.  Additionally, French authorities are currently investigating Papa Massata’s request for USD5 million from the Qatar Olympic committee in exchange for support in their bids in the 2017, 2019 and 2021 World Athletic Championships.
  • September, 2013: On September 8, 2013, it was announced that Tokyo won the bid to host the 2020 Summer Olympic Games.
  • October, 2013: A second payment was made from Japan to the Black Tidings account, making the estimated total payment from a bank account in Japan to Black Tidings “at least US$2m (1.4m pounds)”.
  • March, 2014: An arrangement was agreed upon in which Shobukhova would accept a suspension in exchange for a “refund” of €300,000, off of the original €450,000 extortion payment, primarily because the cover up failed. This payment was made from a bank account in Singapore, listed under Black Tidings.
  • December, 2014: Diack Sr was arrested for alleged acceptance of more than €1 million in bribes to cover up doping violations. He is currently being investigated by French authorities.
  • January, 2016: The Guardian reported on the contents of leaked emails that Papa Massata Diack arranged to have “parcels” delivered to influential members of the IOC in May, 2008 in an attempt to gain support for Qatar in its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
  • May, 2016: The head of Tokyo 2020, Tsunekazu Takeda, has admitted that such payments were made to Black Tidings, but states that the payments are for legitimate services rendered. Takeda has launched in an investigation into these payments.

In other words, there is a consistent set of allegations of payments connected to Papa Massata Diack, an influential figure in international sports, to cover up illegalities or quietly provide support. The vehicle connected to Diack is a company called Black Tidings, which has been linked to the doping cover up of marathoner, Shobukhova, and the Tokyo bid for the 2020 Olympics.

These reports sadden me. What will we learn next?

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NBC’s Gazzillion Dollar Olympic Investment: Is the Sky Falling or Is the Sky the Limit?

NBC Rio logo

The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) aired the 1964 Tokyo Olympics Games in America, the first time events were broadcast live via satellite. With a 13-hour time difference between New York and Tokyo, the opening ceremonies of the Games on October 10 appeared on American televisions in the middle of the night. After that, NBC offered about an hour of highlights after prime time, fearful of eating into the ratings of their lucrative evening programming.

NBC didn’t get high marks for their coverage, and eventually lost the Games to ABC, which became the network of the Olympics over the late 60s and 1970s. Thanks to ABC’s coverage, the Olympics emerged as a premier marketing opportunity for sponsors and broadcasters. In America, the three networks fought furiously for broadcast rights.

NBC currently owns US broadcasting rights through 2032, having bid an incredible $7.65 billion dollars for the Summer and Winter Games through that period. With so much riding on the Games, not only for NBC, but obviously also for Brazil, the IOC and the athletes, it’s no surprise that commentators around the world are casting doom and gloom on the upcoming Rio Olympics. A doctor in Canada has even called for the postponement of the Games until the zika virus threat is deemed less of a risk.

It’s also possible that the entire track and field team from the Soviet Union will be banned from participating in the Rio Olympics due to state-sponsored doping. Michael Colangelo of the blog, The Fields of Green, recently wrote that the lack of Russian competition will strike a great blow on the success of the Rio Olympics, particularly on the viewer ratings of NBC. “The problem is that as doping seems to become more prolific — with Russia essentially running a doping program at a national level — bans and bad news could affect the television ratings this year and beyond.”

Colangelo went on to write, “It’s a balancing act and the only loser right now is NBC. As the Olympics get closer, the IOC and its partners will have to work to make sure that all parties’ investment in the games is worthwhile. That seems close to impossible right now.”

That was actually a concern in 1984. As you may recall, the United States and over 60 other countries boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics, primarily due to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Four years later, 15 nations led by the Soviet Union boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics. Michael Payne, who wrote the fascinating book called “Olympic Turnaround“, said that the American Broadcasting Company paid a then-record $225 million for rights for the Summer Games in Los Angeles and the Winter Games in Sarajevo, and that ABC bean counters started shouting that the sky was falling when the boycott was announced.

Roone Arledge
Roone Arledge

 

And then stepped in ABC Sports President and Olympic broadcasting legend, Roone Arledge. Like Henry V in Shakespeare’s eponymous classic play, Arledge faced down the naysayers, according to Payne, and stated with conviction that the Los Angeles Games would be a moment of triumph.

By early 1984, ABC’s financial leaders were running scared about a potential ratings collapse due to the Soviet-led boycott, and attempted to renegotiate terms. Arledge argued that the Soviets had done them all a favor, as the boycott would only allow Americans to win even more gold medals. “They would not lose viewers, they would gain them.”

Arledge was right, ABC’s coverage of Los Angeles set new ratings records. From Los Angeles in 1984 onwards the Olympic Games began to have a dramatic effect on the US advertising market. More than half of the advertising available for all sports for all networks for the entire yea was spent on the Olympics over two weeks. “We’d not only captured the market, we’d suck it dry,” Roone Arledge observed.

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The Javelin Hotbed of Scandinavia

There is something visceral about the javelin throw. After all, it was one of the few Olympic events that harken back to ancient military weaponry.

There is also something quirky about the javelin throw. In this wikiHow page on how to throw a javelin, you can see that a javelin thrower runs with his body facing sideways and the upper half of the body learning away from the direction the athlete wants to throw.

javelin form
Javelin throwing form

But for whatever reason, the best javelin throwers have hailed from the Scandinavian nations of Finland, Norway and Sweden. In fact, out of a total of 72 javelin Olympic medalists since 1908, 32 or 44% have gone to throwers from Scandinavia. The site Peak Performance makes an attempt to provide reasons for Finland’s dominance.

Theory #1 is that the javelin throw was Finland’s everyman’s sport, according to the same site.

Sociology emeritus professor Paavo Seppanen has been following sport closely for more than 60 years. In his view, the javelin throw is a model of an individual pursuit which doesn’t need much equipment or facilities. “In the countryside, any small boy could make a rudimentary birch or alder javelin and throw it in any open field. Throwing things – along with lifting stones, putting shots, wrestling arms, climbing trees, etc – has always been part of Finnish physical exercise tradition.”

Theory #2 is the cold dark climate of the area. In this case, the writer refers to Finland.

“The Finns have been moulded psychologically by the extremes of their climate,” says [Chris] Turner (British journalist). “Long dark winters and short glorious summers have produced the archetypal strong but silent national character. The javelin suits the Finns, providing an emotional release for all their pent-up feelings. It’s the dual release of spear and emotion which the Finns so much enjoy.”

Theory #3 is a corollary on Theory #2, in that the reserved nature of the Finns provides a firm launching pad for explosive throws.

The site quotes 1964 Olympic champion, Pauli Nevala.

According to 1964 Olympic Champion Pauli Nevala’s amusing definition, “what a great javelin thrower needs is a combination of egocentrism, guts bordering stupidity, plus lots of ambition and limitless greed to succeed – all of which happen to be scorned by our society!”

Whatever the reason, the Scandinavian hotbed is still hot! Of the nine javelin medalists in the past three Summer Games, four have been from Norway and Finland.

Finnish Javelin Legends
The photograph of Jonni Myyr… (the winner), flanked by his countrymen Urho Peltonen, Paavo Johansson-Jaale and Julius Saaristo, remains one of the defining moments of Finnish sport.
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Dueling Finns at the Tokyo Olympics: Javelin Throwers Pauli Nevala and Terje Pedersen

Pauli Nevala throwing in Tokyo_Tokyo Olympiad Kyodo News Agency
Pauli Nevala throwing at the 1964 Olympics, from the book Tokyo Olympiad_Kyodo News Agency

Terje Pedersen was the golden boy of javelin throwing from Oslo, Norway. He was 193 cm tall, weighing 93 kilograms, blond and handsome, and was the first person ever to throw a spear over 90 meters, setting a world record at 91.72 meters only five weeks prior to the start of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964.

For the citizens of Norway, Nevala may have been expected to take home gold, joining three other Finnish throwers who had won gold in the javelin throw in prior Olympics. And yet, on that cold and wet day on October 14, 1964, Pedersen threw poorly, his best throw of 72.1 meters, nearly 20 meters off of his world record, fell .21 cm short of qualifying for the finals.

The golden boy was out. For desperate Finns, in walked an unlikely hero, or as Neil Allen, who chronicled the 1964 Games in his book, Olympic Diary Tokyo 1964, called Pauli Nevala, the “lucky” Olympic champion. There’s not much written in English about the javelin competition, but Allen mentioned that Nevala was not as popular as Pedersen, and that in fact, “his selection for the Finnish national team prompted several hundred letters to the athletics association saying he was not good enough to go to Tokyo.”

Terje Pedersen
Terje Pedersen

Was Nevala unliked for some personal reason? As Pedersen had just set the world record so convincingly, was there room for only one national hero in the emotional mindshare of Norwegians? I don’t know. But Nevala assumed the mantle regardless. Nevala was certainly a deserving javelin thrower, his personal best of 86.33 being very close to the world record at the time in July 1963, but in the qualifying round at the Tokyo Games, he was in the middle of the pack with throws in the low 70s.

 

In the final round, Nevala improved, throwing 76.42 meters and then 78.39 meters. In the fourth throw, he uncorked a throw of 82.66 meters to take the lead. Gergely Kulcsar of Hungary and Janis Lusis of the Soviet union tried desperately to hit that mark, but fell short as the long wet day dragged on. Nevala was the unexpected Finnish and Olympic champion. Below is footage of his winning throw.

In an AP report at the time, the javelin coach for Finland, Hans Oeverland, painted a bleak picture for his countrymen, saying the competition was “quite disappointing for us and disastrous for Pedersen. But we will make no excuses. The weather was bad but it was the same for all competitors. I guess it all was a question about nerves.”

Hmmm…but what of Finnish champion Nevala?

Gergely_Kulcsár,_Pauli_Nevala,_Jānis_Lūsis_1964 on medal stand (color)
Gergely Kulcsar, Pauli Nevala, Janis Lusis

 

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John Akhwari and His Last Place Finish: The Source of One of the Greatest Sports Soundbites of All Time

John Akhwari's bandaged leg
John Stephen Akhwari walking his final lap

Mamo Wolde had already completed the 42-kilometer marathon in the oxygen-thin air of Mexico City, continuing Ethiopian dominance in the footsteps of Abebe Bikila. Wolde had already received his gold medal, and was likely resting somewhere inside the stadium when a humming murmur turned into joyful cheers on that evening of October 20, 1968.

A man was walking into the Estadio Olimpico Universitario, his right leg heavily bandaged. He limped decidedly, the result of falling close to the halfway point in the marathon while jockeying for position. He had dislocated his knee and banged up his shoulder in the collision with the pavement. He got treated, and kept running despite the pain, and the cramps.

While 17 in the 54-man field did not complete this most grueling of the long-distance competitions, John Stephen Akhwari of Tanzania, was determined to finish. As intoned in this somewhat over-the-top narration of Akhwari’s final steps in this video below, “a voice calls from within to go on, and so he goes on.”

Afterwards it was written, today we have seen a young African runner who symbolizes the finest in the human spirit, a performance that gives true dignity to sport, a performance that lifts sport out of the category of grown men playing a game, a performance that gives meaning to the word courage. All honor to John Stephen Akhwari of Tanzania.

When asked why he kept running, Akhwari gave one of the most memorable quotes in sporting history: “My country did not send me 5,000 miles away to start the race. They sent me 5,000 miles to finish it.”

John Stephen Akhwari

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Ewa Klubokowska’s Timing was Right in 1964, But Wrong in 1967: The Inexact Science of Gender Testing in the 1960s

Halina Górecka and Ewa Kłobukowska 1964
Ewa Kłobukowska in 1964

Can you come in second and still set a world record? In the 1960s, the answer was “Yes”.

Take a close look at the table below. The winners of the Women’s 4X100 relay at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics was Poland, followed quickly by the United States and Great Britain.

4x100 womens relay 1964 results table

Do you see it?

That’s right. A world record was set at the Tokyo Games, but it was credited to the United States team with a time of 43.9 seconds, this despite Poland’s faster time of 43.6 seconds.

While Poland’s anchor, Ewa Klobukowska finished 0.3 seconds ahead of US anchor Edith McGuire, it took McGuire and the US team another three years to overtake Klobukowska and the Poland team. And it happened under unusual circumstances.

Klubowska, seen here triumphantly at the end of the 1964 4×100 relay finals, was a year away from achieving Olympic glory at the 1968 Mexico City Games when she failed a gender test. There was significant attention given to female athletes, particularly those from the Soviet bloc nations, due to physically masculine characteristics. Due to the failed test, she was unceremoniously banned from competing in athletics. She was not accused of doping, but instead was found to have “one chromosome too many”, as the IAAF put it at the time.

As we learn in school, men have a combination of one X and one Y chromosome, while women have two X chromosomes. Apparently, Klobukowska was found in 1967 to have, as Wikipedia put it, “a genetic mosaic of XX/XXY”. But the science of gender genetics was advancing quickly, and a year later a different test was used to determine gender, one called the Barr Body test. A Barr Body, as far as I can understand it, is a cell that has more than one X chromosome. In other words, women would have Barr Bodies, while men would not.

From the Mexico City Games in 1968, the International Olympic Committee began using the Barr Body test. If Klobukowska had been tested in 1968 instead of 1967, it would have been revealed that she had a Barr Body despite the additional “Y” chromosome, and thus should have been classified as female.

Ewa Klobukowska portrait

When Klobukowska was tested in 1967, and found to have a Y chromosome, the IOC ruled that the Poland team could remain gold-medal champions in their 1964 race, but that their world record time would be discounted. Since the time of the silver-medal team from US was also faster than the previous world record, they were granted recognition of having broken the record. Perhaps IOC’s decision was an acknowledgement of the inexact science that was (and is) gender genetics. But the test revelation created a cloud of shame over Klobukowska, in hindsight, one that should have never emerged.

One unanswered question for me – if the Barr Body test in 1968 would likely have not resulted in Klobukowska’s ban, why does the IOC not restore Poland’s world record time in 1964?

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Will New Revelations Keep the Entire Russian Track and Field Team from the Rio Olympics?

Yuliya and Vitaly Stepanov on 60 Minutes
Yuliya and Vitaly Stepanov on 60 Minutes. Click on picture to go to video.

On May 8, CBS aired Armen Keteyian‘s interview of Yuliya and Vitaly Stepanov, Russians who fled to the United States after the world learned that they were the informants to a German documentary on massive state-sponsored doping of athletes in Russia. As a result of that documentary and a subsequent investigation by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the IAAF banned Russian track and field athletes from competing in international competitions, including the 2016 Rio Olympics.

In this interview, Vitaly explained that he had surreptitiously taped a talk with Grigory Rodchenkov, the man who ran the drug-testing lab in Russia and was now in the United States as well because of what he believed was a threat to his life if he stayed. (Two of his colleagues had died unexpectedly in February according to the New York Times.) Rodchenkov said that not only was the state-sponsored doping widespread throughout the Russian government, not only were Russian athletes competing in the Summer Olympics tainted by doping, but at least four gold medal winners of the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia doped.

Grigory Rodchenkov
Grigory Rodchenkov

On May 12, the New York Times released an article based on an interview with Rodchenkov, who was introduced by the producer of a documentary on Russia doping. According to the Times, Rodchenkov developed a “three-drug cocktail of banned substances that he mixed with liquor” that helped potentially dozens of Russian athletes, and that some of Russia’s biggest names in cross-country skiing and bobsledding at the Sochi Games were given this cocktail.

Rodchenkov also actively covered up the doping by ensuring tainted urine would not be tested. Here’s how the Times explained the operation:

In a dark-of-night operation, Russian antidoping experts and members of the intelligence services surreptitiously replaced urine samples tainted by performance-enhancing drugs with clean urine collected months earlier, somehow breaking into the supposedly tamper-proof bottles that are the standard at international competitions, Dr. Rodchenkov said. For hours each night, they worked in a shadow laboratory lit by a single lamp, passing bottles of urine through a hand-size hole in the wall, to be ready for testing the next day, he said. By the end of the Games, Dr. Rodchenkov estimated, as many as 100 dirty urine samples were expunged.

hole in the wall
The hole in the wall (covered by a removable cap) through which tainted urine samples were passed and replaced by clean samples during the Sochi Games, according to Dr. Rodchenkov. NY Times

The big question hanging over the Rio Olympics is whether the ban on the entire Russian track and field team would be lifted in time for competition at the Games starting on August 5. According to the CEO of the US Anti-Doping Agency, Travis Tygart, in the 60 Minutes piece, this new information from Rodchenkov does not bode well.

Look, it’s a stunning revelation. And if true it’s a devastating blow to the Olympic values. It’s clearly the final nail in the coffin for Russian track and field.

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Outrage or Guilt: Edward Seidensticker, Yoshinori Sakai and the Appropriateness of Reminding the World of Hiroshima at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics

Edwared Seidensticker

Edward Seidensticker was a translator from Japanese to English, and was so proficient in Japanese that by the time the Tokyo Olympics rolled around in 1964, he had already translated the works of Japanese novelists Niwa Fumio and Tanizaki Junichiro. He would go on to translate one of the world’s earliest novels, “The Tale of Genji” as well as the works of Kawabata Yasunari, which led to his selection as the first Japanese to receive a Nobel Prize.

But his formative years as a young adult was as a translator for the US Marines in the Pacific War, as well as in Post-War Japan during the American occupation. And in the weeks leading up to Tokyo Olympics, Seidensticker reportedly stuck his neck out.

It was already news that the Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee had selected a 19-year-old freshman from Waseda University named Yoshinori Sakai to run into the National Olympic Stadium, carry the sacred Olympic torch up the steps and then light the Olympic cauldron. Sakai was born on August 6, 1941, in Hiroshima, the day an atom bomb was dropped on that city.

Sakai at cauldron 2

Seidensticker was reported to have objected to this particular selection, saying that choosing Sakai was not “incidental”, and that it was “unpleasant to the Americans”.

When a member of the International Olympic Committee was asked to comment on Seidensticker’s reaction, G. D. Sondhi of India, who had just witnessed Sakai’s torch lighting at the opening ceremonies, replied “He is good and I’m happy to see him do it so nicely. We must bring young people in the Olympics and let those old men just sit and help them.” Sondhi went on to say in an article from the October 11, 1964 Mainichi Daily News that he did not think Sakai’s selection to be political, and rather thought that Sakai was “a big hope” for Japan, and was “the most touching of all Olympic ceremonies I ever saw”.

Take a look at the first 10 minutes of Kon Ichikawa‘s classic documentary, Tokyo Olympiad. Ichikawa shows in dramatic fashion the blazing sun, old buildings being demolished making way for modern-looking stadiums. Ichikawa charts the path of the sacred flame, ignited in Greece, and carried in an amazing international relay through the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, North Asian and finally into Japan.

After the torch leaves Okinawa, it arrives in Hiroshima. As you can see at about the 6-minute mark of the film, Ichikawa uses a helicopter to focus in on the famed Hiroshima Dome, its skeletal frame a reminder of the atomic bomb’s power, and a symbol for resilience. The Mainichi Daily News wondered if this scene would also arouse the ire of Seidensticker and others like him.

October 1964 was barely 19 years removed from the disastrous end to the war in Japan. Those who remembered the war on both sides could be excused for a nerve unexpectedly exposed on occasion. But I can’t help but believe that the choice of Sakai, born symbolically out of the ashes of Japan’s greatest disaster, was an inspired and most appropriate choice.

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Archie Williams: Won Gold in Berlin and Trained Pilots at the Tuskegee Institute

Archie Williams in Berlin 2
Archie Williams at the Berlin Olympics in 1936
Jesse Owens won four gold medals in Berlin in 1936, and came home to American a hero…for about a week…before he was then treated like any other black American. Unable to find work, he gave up his amateur status and earned a living as an entertainer, most famously sprinting and winning against thoroughbred horses. “People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can’t eat four gold medals.”

Archie Williams was a teammate of Owens, one of ten black Americans on that 1936 USA team at the Berlin Olympics. And while he didn’t get the fanfare of Owens, Williams was already the owner of the world record time in the 400 meters, and would go on to win the gold medal in the 400 in Berlin. After the Olympics, Williams went on to graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in mechanical engineering, as well as in aeronautical engineering from the Air Force Engineering School at Wright-Patterson Field, as well as in meteorology from UCLA.

But as was true for the majority of blacks in America, it was a challenge to get the opportunities to get ahead. Williams was quoted as saying, “When I came home, somebody asked me, ‘How did those dirty Nazis treat you?’ I replied that I didn’t see any dirty Nazis, just a lot of nice German people. And I didn’t have to ride in the back of the bus over there.”

Williams was a graduate of Berkeley with a degree in engineering in a war-time economy that could only be described as heated. But, Williams could not find gainful employment at places like GM or GE that were hiring to keep up with demand, as he explained in the oral history of American Olympians, Tales of Gold.

Those big corporations just weren’t hiring black people. They weren’t, and who else would? Look, I had a job one summer making $5 a week chopping weeds for the East Bay Water Company. Later I thought about working as an engineer for them. And I talked to the guy down there, but he said, “Sorry about that.”

Williams had a passion for planes, and wanted to become a pilot. He eventually got a job “gassing airplanes”, which is essentially fueling the planes, and warming them up. He had to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, but he also got to fly, build up his hours in the air, and get his flying qualifications. And yet, he couldn’t get up that next rung in the career ladder, as he explained. “That was early in 1941. Again, a black guy with a pilot’s license and an instructor’s rating; he’s…well, he’s nothing. Even the guy I worked for couldn’t hire me as a flying instructor. He’d have lost all his business.”

Archie Williams in Tuskegee
Archie Williams (2nd Right) at Tuskegee, 1944
There were apparently very few black pilots in the 1940s, and even fewer opportunities for them in America. But as is often the case, war forces people to look beyond color. The US Army had established a training center for African Americans in Tuskegee, Alabama, where blacks were educated at Tuskegee University and trained at Tuskegee Army Air Field. Williams one day in 1941 heard about the Tuskegee program, and took his pilot’s license and mechanical engineering degree to the Tuskegee Institute.

Williams began his career as a pilot instructor in Alabama, and his first students were the famed Tuskegee Airmen, whose planes were called Red Tails for the color of the tails on their P-47s and P-51s, and who went on to fighting glory in North Africa and Italy.

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The Ageless Gymnast Oksana Chusovitina: To Compete in Her Seventh Olympiad in Rio

Oksana Chusovitina in Six Olympiads
Oksana Chusovitina in Six Olympiads

When she arrives at Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Summer Games, she will have turned 41 years old. For most Olympians, that’s old. For female gymnasts, that’s ancient.

Oksana Chusovitina was selected as a member of the Uzbekistan’s women’s gymnastics team. And while Chusovitina will be far more than twice the age of her teammates and competitors, she will also have infinitely more experience. The Rio Olympics will be her seventh Olympic Games. Not only has she competed in seven Olympic Games, she has done so, essentially, for three different teams:

  • The Unified Team (participants from former USSR): 1992 Barcelona Games
  • Uzbekistan: 1996 Atlanta Games, 2000 Sydney Games, 2004 Athens Games, 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games
  • Germany: 2008 Beijing Games, 2012 London Games

Here is a basic fact. Since 1972, the all-around Olympic women’s gymnastics champions have been 20 years old or less, the majority of them being teenagers. There is a biological and evolutionary reason for this, according to a fascinating book I am currently reading on the science of athletic physiology, The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance, by David Epstein. He writes that girls and boys physically mature at practically equal rates until the age of 10. Top running speeds, for example, are the same for 10-year-old boys and girls. But boys get a significant boost in athletic prowess from the start of puberty around the age of 14. Girls at the age of 14 tend to peak physically in some respects. For example Epstein explains that the average female runner is already approaching her fastest lifetime sprint speed by the age of fourteen.

Epstein also explains that female gymnasts need slim hips and low centers of gravity to perform swiftly and agilely at the international level. Unfortunately for aspiring female gymnasts, biology conspires against them.

The Sports Gene Book Cover 2013Studies of Olympians show that an important trait of female athletes in certain sports is that they don’t develop the wide hips that many other women do. If elite female gymnasts go through a significant growth spurt in height or hips, their career at the top level is essentially over. As they increase in size faster than strength, the power-to-weight ratio that is so critical to aerial maneuvers goes in the wrong direction, as does their ability to rotate in the air. Female gymnasts are pronounced over the hill by twenty, whereas male gymnasts are still early in their careers.

In other words, Chusovitina is an outlier of significant proportions, an aging gymnast who has sustained the proper power-to-weight ratio while maintaining the training, the technique, the stamina and the mental strain to compete at an Olympic level.

She won a team gold medal in 1992, and a bronze medal in the individual vault competition in 2008. At the age of 41, can Chusovitina, still a top ten vaulter in the world, find Olympic glory one more time?

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