WORLD GYMNASTICS TRIALS : Sport Is Trying to Deal With Weighty Issues

The reporters have been circling, showing up at events and gyms where they are not welcome. Since the publication of Joan Ryan’s expose on gymnastics, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” the hot topics in the sport are the problems of eating disorders and abusive coaches, not Shannon Miller’s new floor exercise routine.

A crew from CBS’ “60 Minutes” was at the U.S. National Championships in New Orleans last month, but USA Gymnastics, which governs the sport in this country, wouldn’t let it in. The TV crew also has tried to interview Bela Karolyi, who is alleged by some former students in the book to be a verbally abusive and insensitive coach. He has declined.

But Thursday, after gymnasts had finished practicing for the World Championship trials which begin here today, Karolyi had a few things to say.

And before the women take the floor for the first round of competition at the Frank Erwin Center tonight, officials from the sport will hold a news conference to detail methods they hope will help educate the athletes and eradicate problems faced by young female gymnasts--eating disorders, amenorrhea, the delayed onset of menstruation, and osteoporosis or brittle bones. Officials say a task force was working on the problems long before the book came out.

In Ryan’s book, several of Karoyli’s former students accused the longtime coach of eroding their self-esteem and making them paranoid about food. They accused Karolyi of calling them names, such as a “pregnant goat.” Karolyi says this name-calling was exaggerated, but does admit to having told students they are fat.

“If they are fat, I say fat,” Karolyi said. “I don’t know another word for it.”

Karolyi, however, blames the parents of the students who spoke out against him. In the book, Ryan details the deaths of two gymnasts, Christy Henrich, who died of anorexia, and Julissa Gomez, who died while in a coma, which her parents say was the hospital’s fault. But Gomez was in the hospital because she was paralyzed after trying a risky vault she never felt confident with.

Henrich was not a student of Karolyi’s and Gomez was not his student when she died. But Gomez had trained under Karolyi and her parents accused him of verbal abuse.

Said Karolyi: “[The parents] were advised. I told them, Julissa is a beautiful girl, but a very fragile one. She did not handle high pressure. I told them to let her enjoy gymnastics, keep her in the sport, but do not push her. But they took her from one club to another. Who is responsible for that?

” . . . After the ’84 Olympics, Mary Lou [Retton] generated a lot of money and made the big time, and that gave a false impression to parents. Kristie Phillips. Erica Stokes. It is the parents, not the kids . . . who were forcing their children.”

Addressing the other problems of young female gymnasts, Nancy Thies Marshall, a 1972 Olympian who is now vice chairman of women for USA Gymnastics, said, “If you take the percentage of the kids in the sport who have eating disorders, it is a small percentage. But that doesn’t make it any less important.

“An eating disorder is like a germ. If you put it in a positive culture, it is going to grow. These are young adolescents who are developing their self-esteem and their bodies. We are a highly technical sport, and the profile of a gymnast is of a perfectionist, one who pays attention to detail and has obsessive behavior. These traits correlate with the personality traits of adolescents who tend to have disordered eating problems.”

Marshall had an eating disorder for about a year after the ’72 Olympics, when she moved out of state to join her coach in Oregon. She was 15 then, and her body began to change. She started gaining weight and her self-esteem plummeted. At 14, she had been the youngest gymnast to make an Olympic team, and the resulting pressure was difficult for her. When her parents realized what was happening, she said, they made her return home and she eventually recovered.

“There are two different ways to approach this,” Marshall said. “One is to give information about nutrition for the gymnast who wants to perform her best, that’s what I could have used. But with an eating disorder, the issue is not nutrition, it is self-esteem. They are already paranoid about food.”

USA Gymnastics already has a support system for its national team members, employing a staff nutritionist and a psychologist. But the national governing body wants to broaden the program. Studies indicate that gymnastics has a higher rate of eating disorders than the general population, but there have been few other studies to indicate the long-term physical effects from the long hours of training.

Brad Smith, USA Gymnastic’s national trainer, says there are no more injuries in gymnastics than in other sports he has worked with, among them soccer, high school sports and pro football.

“But we need more answers,” he said. “We need to know what we are doing with this particular age group. Is it a kid’s responsibility to tell a coach they can’t train? We need preventive research information.”

That’s what the task force eventually hopes to provide.