Hanging Tough: Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports by Michael Sokolove

The triumph of China's gold medalist women's gymnastics team has sparked much discussion of the likelihood that two or three of the team's members are younger than the minimum age for Olympic competition, raising the question of the dangers of allowing such young athletes compete in the Olympics.

Michael Sokolove, author of the just published Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports, has pointed out that, contrary to the popular wisdom that older, more competition-hardened gymnasts have an advantage, the younger, smaller, and allegedly under-aged Chinese girls actually have several factors on their side. These very small gymnasts, who look as if they should be practicing for their Brownie Fly-Up ceremony instead of world competition, as a team average 77 pounds. In Sokolove's view, women's gymnastics is one sport in which the strength-to-weight ratio is most advantageous for the small, pre-pubescent performer. Quickness and lightness enable winning routines, which accounts for the dearth of over-18 medalists worldwide. Gymnastics actually is a girls' sport, not a women's sport.

Youthfulness also has its psychological advantages. Younger, less sophisticated girls may be less affected by the stress of top-level competition, because they have had less exposure to media hype and the geo-political implications of the competition. And, as any parent of young teens can attest, the younger brain just has not developed to the point where consideration of long-term risks overrides current desires, resulting in a lessened fear of immediate or long-term injury.

Sokolove points to the eightfold ratio of sports injuries for females compared to males in all sports. He insists that this level of injury is not inevitable, but the result of aspects of competition which have evolved over the past few decades. He warns that both sexes are endangered by current practice which encourage year-round training and continuously playing of a single sport at a high level, without the developmental benefits of cross-training. Because of joint structure, however, girls are particularly likely to have ACL or ankle damage if these areas are overstressed in competition or intense training.

The author hastens to say that he is not questioning the courage or competitive spirit of female athletes. Pointedly he has said, "If you get a broken ankle in the NFL, they put a cast on it. In gymnastics they send you back out to keep on competing" (to stick a dismount in the cases of Olympians Kerrie Strug and Chellsea Memmel). From these examples, he adds, young girls learn they have to be strong and tough enough to compete despite serious injuries. That becomes the ethos, he says, where girls feel "we have to prove our place, our bona fides, on the athletic field."

The take-home message is that parents and coaches need to show sanity in the face of the drive to win at all costs. Equipment, training, scheduling, and intensity should be carefully supervised. Everyone involved with children's athletics must respect the needs of the growing body first. For both sexes, careers in sport are often short, but disabilities last a lifetime.