Ageing Olympic gymnasts.doc

Ageing Olympic gymnastsHow the gym twiglets grew upAug 1st 2012, 15:56 by A. McE.THE more elderly couch-gymnasts among us are inspired to see Oksana Chusovitina (pictured) still vaulting merrily away at the age of 37. Ms Chusovitina is Uzbek-born, and has competed across six Olympics for the Soviet Union, the national Uzbek team and now Germany, her adopted country.Admittedly, she is an outlier: most female gymnasts, including your correspondent, have moved on from competitive gymnastics long before their thirties. But one heartening aspect of this years Olympics is the extent to which gymnastic careers, which were often brutish and quite short, have lengthened. For many decades, the sport hoovered up young women, with coaches looking for spindly pre-pubescents, in the belief that a slight bone structure and low centre of gravity were the recipe for champions. It had not always been this way. In the 1950s and 1960s, when Hungarys Agnes Keleti and the Soviet Unions Larisa Latynina won golds, they peaked in their late twenties and thirties.But as difficulty increased, coaches adopted a preference for scrawny teenagers. Olga Korbut was 17 when she sprang to fame at the Munich Olympics in 1972, and Nadia Comaneci was just 14 when she won her golds in Montreal in 1976. At the same games, the American team fielded Karen Kelsall, a 13-year old. This struck some as excessively young, although no one has conclusively proved that bashing the bars for several hours a day is any worse for you at 12 than 16. After a few years of moving the criteria back and forth, the Federation Internationale de Gymnastique, which sets the criteria for major competitions, decreed that girls must be 16. In practice, the rule is as bendy as a gymnasts back. Those like Britains Rebecca Tunney, who are within a few months of their 16th birthday when major tournaments loom, are allowed to compete.One consequence of nominal qualifying ages was that some teams, notably China, found themselves accused at the Beijing games of falsifying the birth dates of callow competitors. The Chinese team in London emphasise that their average age is 19.5 (though that hardly sheds much light; the key accusation was that documents had been falsified to start with). In general, though, teams are becoming more age-balanced. This puts female gymnasts more into line with men, who have always been allowed to grow old gracefully in the gym. The late Nicolae Andrianov, who still holds the record for mostgoldmedals (15 in total) in the sport, competed throughout his 20s and 30s. Britains Louis Smith is 23, as is Kohei Uchimura, the Japanese champion. They are unlikely to keep going quite so long as Manilo Pastorini, an Italian who won gold at the age of 41 in 1920.Better training techniques and softer landing mats have helped lengthen gymnastic careers. The good news is that experience seems to pay dividends. Besides the tiny twiglets fighting for medals in Greenwich, there are many older gymnasts like Britains Beth Tweddle, who is dominating the uneven bars at the age of 27. Older compet