Gymnastics always good for drama

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HBO sent me a preview copy of the July 22 edition (10 p.m. EST/PST) of ‘Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel,’ which will have a segment that focuses on how difficult it is to become an elite-level gymnast.

Dominique Moceanu, a member of the 1996 gold medal-winning team dubbed ‘The Magnificent Seven,’ is 26 now and the mother of a seven-month old daughter.

Moceanu told HBO that her sacrifices of living a spartan life, always watching her diet, and enduring several injuries (including a stress fracture during the Olympic year) are not something she’d do again.

She said her coaches, who included Bela and Martha Karolyi, showed ‘very little compassion.’ And she told a story of having an aunt help her to smuggle Twizzlers, Mentos and gum into the practice gym by hiding them inside a teddy bear.

Moceanu didn’t talk about how she tried to qualify for the 2000 Athens Olympics and the 2006 national team , after the Karolyis invited her to the monthly gymnastics training camps at their ranch.

HBO also interviewed Jennifer Sey, a former gymnast who trained in Allentown, Pa., at the Parkettes camp. Sey recently published a book, ‘Chalked Up,’ about her unhappy experiences. She did an extensive interview on Salon.com about why she wrote the book.

Chellsie Memmel, who was named to the U.S. Olympic team last Saturday, told HBO about her efforts to overcome injuries (shoulder and ankle surgery) and living with a diet that includes fruit for breakfast, chicken for lunch and more fruit for dinner. Things that Memmel describes as a normal part of discipline that most elite athletes come to accept.

Women’s gymnastics and figure skating are tough sports. Most elite athletes are no older than 20 and have trained for at least a decade during a time in life when their bones are still growing. The daily pounding often results in stress injuries, small fractures and hip injuries.

There seems an element of sexism, though, when every four years, the Olympics come around -- and women’s gymnastics and figure skating invariably are singled out as being particularly cruel sports.

Nose around youth baseball and check out the surgical scars on pitchers’ elbows. Or women’s high school and college basketball for the knee and shoulder surgical scars. Has Candace Parker, her coaches or family ever been criticized for letting her continue to play basketball after her knee injuries?

These girls may be tiny, but they also are driven athletes. Shawn Johnson would rather be in the gym than on the computer, would rather eat grilled fish than a Big Mac, and says ‘that’s OK’ if she ends up with aches and pain in 10 or 20 years. ‘So do football players,’ Johnson says. ‘Nobody stops them.’

-- Diane Pucin