Women's Artistic Gymnastics

Socio-cultural Perspectives

Roslyn Kerr, Natalie Barker-Ruchti, Carly Stewart, Gretchen Kerr, Roslyn Kerr, Natalie Barker-Ruchti, Carly Stewart, Gretchen Kerr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000051032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book lifts the lid on the high pressured, complex world of women's artistic gymnastics. By adopting a socio-cultural lens incorporating historical, sociological and psychological perspectives, it takes the reader through the story and workings of women's artistic gymnastics.

Beginning with its early history as a 'feminine appropriate' sport, the book follows the sport through its transition to a modern sports form. Including global cases and innovative narrative methods, it explores the way gymnasts have experienced its intense challenges, the complexities of the coach-athlete relationship, and how others involved in the sport, such as parents and medical personnel, have contributed to the reproduction of a highly demanding and potentially abusive sporting culture.

With the focus on a unique women's sport, the book is an important read for researchers and students studying sport sociology, sport coaching, and physical education, but it is also a valuable resource for anyone interested in the development of sporting talent.

Part I

The history, politics, commercialisation, and diversification of women’s artistic gymnastics

Jenny’s story Part I: Frank

James Pope

When you watch real champions, you see this amazing skill, amazing strength and control and balance, and you just think of the beauty, you never think of what made that beauty, the massive effort that goes into the ‘effortless’ elegance. You wouldn’t, would you? Unless you’re a gymnast yourself or you know someone who is.

I used to watch the TV and my mum’s old videos: her hero was Nadia Comaneci, but I really loved Svetlana Khorkina. The 2000 Olympics when she won gold on the bar. Wow! Tall and slim, not really the stereotype. I was only six or so, and had just started really, but I was captivated and I still feel that thrill of how she impressed me. I still get goosebumps if I watch YouTube videos of her. I still love to watch it. I made a scrapbook with WAG photos, and news stories, and I wrote all my own notes on the pages. I’ve still got that scrapbook, and I see how absorbed I was. I got hooked quickly.

But now when I think back, it’s as if there was a different person there, not really me, although of course it was me, is me. I’ve left it behind, on purpose left it behind … but it’s all still just there, somehow, in the wings of my memory.

So … well, my mum had been a gymnast in her childhood and teens. I’ve seen some old videos, and she was pretty good, to be fair, but maybe not really good enough to go far. I know she competed at regional level. She did know her stuff, and she knew people, and I definitely wouldn’t have got anywhere if she hadn’t been in the sport before me, to guide me.

Mum didn’t push me into it at all. She just said, ‘You don’t have to do gymnastics. And even if you do, you can choose artistic or rhythmic.’ I know she had to give up in the end because she had an injury. She did artistic and injured her back and had to stop, so I think maybe she wasn’t so keen on me doing artistic. It was up to me though. She said, ‘You could do swimming, maybe?’ She did want me to do something, but that wasn’t pressure: she just didn’t want me kind of doing nothing. Anyway, I chose artistic, probably because I knew Mum had done that.

I remember the very first session. I was just excited, not nervous, because at that point I had no idea what was really going to happen. It just felt like going to brownies or something, but a lot more glamorous. Mum had bought me a leotard and shoes. It felt exciting! My first coach, I’ll call him Pete, was so lovely and friendly, and the whole thing seemed so welcoming. It wasn’t too hard to begin with. I mean, we did practise, and we did learn things, but it was just super fun for the first couple of years: I met other girls and we used to chatter and laugh and the coaches would sometime get a bit irritated. But it was lovely. And I fell in love with it. And, I was good. I didn’t really know I was then, but I suppose I must have been, because when I was eight Mum said I was going to have a new coach. ‘You’ve been noticed,’ she said. That phrase stuck with me. I didn’t know what it even meant, but it seemed important!

So I swapped to be with Frank. And I think I sort of swooned when I met him properly and he shook my hand. I’d seen him before of course, because he worked with other girls at the gym. But when Mum actually introduced me, I went a bit melty inside. Frank was old, or that’s how he seemed to me – much older than Mum. But he seemed so big and strong and like a grandad in some way. I remember seeing his big brown forearms, and the black hairs on his arms. It’s odd what you remember, but his arms were so big! So, I wasn’t frightened of him at all. You do hear some people who say they were frightened of their coach, but I wasn’t scared of Frank. I was definitely excited. He had a reputation too – he’d worked in Russia in the past, and that made him like a star. Mum said he was brilliant.

I do remember being a bit nervous to meet Frank again – but the first few sessions were fun, and I loved it immediately. A new level. The buzz when you began to be able to do things you’d never done before. It felt like flying! I was so into it, I couldn’t get enough. I would go home and make up routines and spin and leap around in the garden, pretending I was in the Olympics. Being with Frank seemed to turn me up a notch, or something. Something happened inside me and I was 100% into it. And, also, I always wanted him to like me, that was the thing, so I always tried my best. I wanted him to be pleased with me, and when he was pleased I felt amazing and Mum loved it too.

The first time Frank got angry, I cried, and I remember that made him even more angry. I can’t really remember what I did, or didn’t do, but he yelled at me and made me do the exercise again, and then I started crying even more, and then I remember he came over and comforted me, so I calmed down. I told Mum about it and she said, ‘Well, Frank is the best, Jenny. He had a good reason to shout, I’m sure. He wants you to do your best, that’s all it is.’

And in a way, she was right. He did want me to do my best, and so did I, and so did Mum. It’s not like I was resisting it. I just remember the sudden shock of his voice, so loud, out of the blue, and then it felt confusing maybe, when he was comforting me.

Anyway, it’s a bit hard to remember everything. I was just doing it, not really thinking about it.

So, we carried on, and I got better. Frank did shout a lot, but we always ended up friends, and I know I always wanted to go back. I never refused. Dad used to ask how it had gone, and I would tell him I’d learned this or that routine and he’d be pleased. Mum was a bit like Frank, I guess, now I think back – she wanted me to improve all the time. I was entering local competitions almost right away, even before I started with Frank. It quite quickly became my whole life. I trained five days a week, before school and after school. And if there was a competition coming up I would get pulled out of classes, because I think the gymnastic club had a link with our school, so they didn’t make a fuss. And I suppose the school quite liked having someone competing in events – probably it looked good for the school’s image. Maybe, I don’t know. I didn’t mind missing school, of course! Who would? I thought I was getting kind of free holidays when all the other kids had to slog away.

Really and truly, it was cool. I was a little bit of a star at school, when I was at juniors anyway. There was one other girl at our school who did gymnastics, and she did artistic too. She wasn’t really a friend as such, but what happened was, we spent a lot of time together by being at the club so much. We aren’t friends now. We lost contact. She stopped gymnastics when she went to secondary school. I remember she told me she’d had enough of being ‘tortured’, as she put it.

I didn’t see it, certainly not then. I guess I do now … ‘Torture’ … bit strong! But when you had to do oversplits, Frank would make you hold the position, push your legs down until it hurt and then if you looked like you were going to ease up he’d shout, and you’d be so startled for a moment that you’d stretch even harder, and then it would hurt so much! My God, the pain sometimes. It was necessary though – you would get bad injuries in full performance if you didn’t do all the right exercise, but those oversplits were sometimes brutal. But if I ever moaned to Mum she’d say, ‘OK, Jenny, you stop. Maybe take up netball …’ And right away, I’d be like ‘NOOOOO! I don’t want to do netball!’ It seemed so dull compared to what I did. I already had heroes, and I kind of felt important by doing it. Mum knew that anyway, that’s why she said it. I was going to be like Khorkina. So, I was determined, even when Frank made me want to quit …

Chapter 1

Acrobatisation and establishment of pixie-style women’s artistic gymnastics

Georgia Cervin

Introduction

At its first Olympic Games in 1952, women’s artistic gymnastics (WAG) was one of the few sports available for women to compete in. It was a graceful, elegant sport, associated with femininity. Its athletes were women in their twenties, performing routines based on balletic training. But 20 years later, pre-pubescent girls somersaulting through the air on all apparatus came to represent the sport. This chapter explores the phenomena of this ‘acrobatisation’ and the key figures and moments behind it. Beginning with an introduction to gymnastics and its nineteenth-century roots, it explores the global spread of the sport, from European men to European (and colonial) women. It then surveys the first 20 years of the sport as it was established in the Olympic movement, and the key actors that came to dominate it.

Locating the late 1960s and early 1970s as a time of change, the process of acrobatisation is then discussed, with particular reference to the role of the media in advertising and popularising this new style of WAG. In doing so, the difference in gymnast cohorts is discussed through the themes of femininity and style, maturity, and behaviour including political engagement. This chapter shows that the European, patriarchal thinking that established the sport in the nineteenth century still had a large effect on its development over a century later, and that it was only through fissures in the system – several actors and events over a number of years – that the new, acrobatic style of WAG was finally able to emerge by the 1970s.

Roots of sportive gymnastics

Gymnastics earned its name from the classical training of ancient Greek warriors and athletes¹ (Pfister, 2013), which was adopted when Johann Friedrich GutsMuths and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn created the modern sport. The two Germans devised of several of the key apparatus of gymnastics: the parallel bars, rings, balance beam, and high bar at the turn of the eighteenth century. Modern readers will realise that such apparatus is only used in WAG in a modified manner. Indeed, when GutsMuth and Jahn created their system for the training of bodies, they did so thinking only of European men (Pfister, 2013). Jahn’s Turnen was not a competitive sport, nor was it centred around the individual: it was about building the ‘nation’s strength’ and accordingly imbued with German nationalism (Pfister, 2013). The founder of the Swedish tradition of physical education, Pehr Ling drew on GutsMuth and Jahn’s work to devise ‘educational gymnastics’, which had greater emphasis on training and drill and the authoritarian manner in which it was practised (Barker-Ruchti, 2011). When the Sokol movement in Czechoslovakia grew from the German Turnen, it was adapted to promote Czechoslovakian nationalism. In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, national revolutions spread throughout Europe, ushering in new political ideas and the need to formulate systematic physical training regimes to defend the nation. It is no surprise then that gymnastics, as a form of military training and promotion of nationalism, arose in this context and became practised throughout Europe. This was also a time when the nations promoting military strength would soon cast their eyes outward in search of creating an empire. Such political aspirations were premised on ideas of European supremacy, rationalised by emerging disciplines like physical anthropology, anthropometry, and phrenology (the study of skull measurements and intelligence).

These ideas played important roles in the creation of modern gymnastics and the ideals it espoused. Soon, the advocacy of these ideals through physical activity leant itself to promoting the supremacy of European women as well as men in imperial contexts. Adapted to be suitably feminine, women’s gymnastics was further differentiated from its masculine gymnastic roots with the new name: calisthenics (Chisholm, 2007). Calisthenics were part of a discourse that ‘sought to propagate a modern mode of disciplinary power that aimed to train and (re)form female bodies and behaviours in accordance with conceptions of (genuine) true womanhood’ (Chisholm, 2007, p. 433). That is, just as gymnastics was originally conceived to instil and promote traditional masculine qualities of military prowess, women’s gymnastics was designed to promote femininity: the ultimate example of which being motherhood.

As early gymnastics was being modified into something more appropriate for women, it was also spreading rapidly from Europe through immigrant communities and physical education institutions. In this early globalisation, the nationalist component of the sport was adopted and adapted in each country. Thus, when the first Olympic Games were held in 1896, gymnastics was both popular and important enough in promoting national prestige that it was invited to participate. But it would take the better part of the next 50 years until women’s gymnastics would reach the same permanent status in the Olympic sporting line-up.

Early Olympic gymnastics

While men’s gymnastics became a core feature of the Olympic roster at the Games’ inception, women’s gymnastics was not a consideration. The Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG) had formed in 1881 to reflect the growing interest in the sport, but it would not be until 1928 that a women’s version of the sport appeared at the Games (Cervin, Nicolas, Dufraisse, Bohuon, & Quin, 2017). It was only in 1933 that a committee for women’s gymnastics was formed (Berliox, 1985). But it would be a further two decades before WAG became a standardised sport.

Although the women’s performances at the 1928 Amsterdam Games certainly opened the door for the development of women’s gymnastics as a sport, they were, at the same time, something of an outlier. The competition was a team event only – no doubt influenced by aversion to competitiveness in women (Cahn, 1995; Vertinsky, 1994) – and involved only vault, and the vague ‘apparatus’ which evidently included rope climbing and team drill (Van Rossem, 1928). Not only was the competition format and apparatus not familiar as WAG, the inclusion of women’s gymnastics in the Games was also exceptional: it would not appear again until 1936, then again in 1948.² However, each of these occasions represented one step closer to the modern format. In 1936, gymnasts performed both compulsory and voluntary routines, and competed on vault, paral...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I: The history, politics, commercialisation, and diversification of women’s artistic gymnastics
• PART II: The gymnast experience
• PART III: Coach-athlete relationships
• PART IV: The multiple actors involved in creating an elite gymnast
• Conclusion
• Index