Children as young as five waking up at six and taking part in grueling training exercises to make them Olympic champions. Scouts in elementary schools across the country measuring children to see how they will develop and sending the most likely prospects into athletic schools, whether or not they show interest. A state determined to win Olympic medals, so much so that they disregard the education and emotional health of their elite athletes. Four-time rowing gold medalist Matthew Pinsent’s recent visit to, and subsequent condemnation of, China’s elite sport school Shi Cha Hai alerted many to the presence of these scenarios in the Chinese sport system.
His remarks to the BBC have sparked a debate about China’s winning bid for the 2008 Olympics, but this debate raises issues that resound across the world of sports, issues that concern how children become athletes, how athletes are trained, and whether they ignore their future in order to excel at their chosen sports.
It does seem atrocious to force children into a sport, but that habit is not limited to the Chinese. It occurs in the United States all too often, only instead of through a government program, it is overzealous parents determined to have their children become Olympians. Just look at how speed skating gold medalist Shani Davis got started, with his mother, Cherie, taking him to skating rinks at two-and-a-half years old and giving him quarters for skating as fast as he could, waking him up before school every day to run a mile, and signing him up for intensive classes when he was only six.
“It’s easy for him because I do the work,” she told the Denver Post.
Athletes start just as early here as they do in China, especially in sports that have young peak ages such as gymnastics or figure skating, two of the most popular Olympic events. Of the eight women who have won Olympic gold in all-round rhythmic gymnastics since 1976, two were 15, one was 16, one was 17 and two were 19. As Istvan Balvi of the National Coaching Institute of British Columbia insists, if it takes 10 years to produce an elite athlete, and the Olympic peak age is in late adolescence, then in order to be competitive athletes are forced to start early in life.
This means that athletes enter the sporting world before they have had a chance to experience life outside of it. Add to this the fact that the American sports establishment barely prepares athletes for life after their sport, and you’ve got a recipe for misery. Even if an athlete is lucky enough to win large sponsorships, one day the fans will stop screaming, the cameras will stop flashing, and the dream will end. Psychology Today reports that “those at greatest risk of post-retirement letdown are the athletes who dominate their profession, who know nothing of failure and everything of success.” These are the athletes who are least prepared to cope with the day-to-day clutter and problems of the real world.
This is especially true in sports, like gymnastics, that start at a very early age. Children that have been sport-focused their entire lives have never really learned to interact with others. Instead they have been incubated in a world of adults — coaches, trainers and nutritionists — or at best, other children who are as goal-oriented as they are. And without the usual interaction with their peers, their emotional development falters, leaving them less able to deal with life after their sport ends.
“Because they’ve been so focused on sports from an early age, many athletes never develop necessary parts of the self,” observes Cristina Versari, head of sports psychology at San Diego University for Integrative Studies, in Psychology Today. “There’s a developmental arrest.”
But it’s more than just dealing with the real world — once someone leaves a sport they have spent their entire life training for, they rarely are qualified to do anything else. For every gold medalist there are silver and bronze medalists, athletes almost as good but who seldom receive the lucrative sponsorships or rewards that come with the gold. It is the lucky ones who plan ahead and work at their educations at the same time they work on their handsprings.
Only recently has the athletic community started to grasp this problem. A forum of the International Olympic Commission recently issued a recommendation that athletes seriously consider life after their sports. It suggested that athletes not only use the opportunities given to them to network and manage their money, but that they should also consider getting an education while in pursuit of the gold.
These seem like very common-sense ideas, but when one is caught up in the fast-paced world of sports it is easy to forget about anything but your athletic career and fritter your earnings away. Look at former baseball star J.R. Richard, found living under a bridge or world-class sprinter Huston McTear, homeless in Sweden.
But it isn’t enough to simply make recommendations. The athletic community, especially the Olympic commission and the nations that devote so much money to building champion teams, should make sure that their athletes are prepared for life after retirement. Some of those multimillion-dollar contracts should be funneled into a program that allows for job training. Olympic teams should be affiliated with universities that will accept them after their peak ages have passed. But more importantly, the Olympic Commission needs to take a long hard look at raising the ages for their athletes, allowing them to have a better, safer childhood.
So in the midst of all the hype of the Winter Olympics, take a second to look at those hopefuls who don’t make it to the podium, those who have trained just as hard but who, for whatever reason, didn’t cut it. Imagine now, that this is their retirement, their entrance into the real world. Imagine how they’ll survive, without much of an education, without proper emotional development, without the money and glory of the gold.
