Tribulations Over Trials

Welcome to 1996 U.S. Olympic women’s gymnastics trials, where the leading practitioners in their field are not in the field.

Shannon Miller, the most decorated American gymnast ever, a winner of five Olympic medals and nine World Championship medals and the reigning U.S. champion, is out of the competition because of a wrist injury.

Dominique Moceanu, a 14-year-old who has a 1995 U.S. national championship medal and her own autobiography, is out too, laid up with a four-inch-long stress fracture in her right shin.

Miller and Moceanu, MIA.

The short list of this year’s American gymnastics gold-medal challengers and the disabled list, one and the same.

Miller and Moceanu will attend the trials, which begin today at the FleetCenter, but they are here only as interested bystanders, hopeful that scores achieved three weeks ago in Knoxville, Tenn., at the national championships will hold up through the weekend and enable them to wince their way to Atlanta. That is their only remaining path to these Olympics--by way of injury petition.

In the meantime, the grown-ups involved in the sport are forced to hold tedious news conferences to explain, in exacting detail, the hows and whys of the Olympic petition process and face a few questions they’d just as soon bypass.

A popular one at the moment: Is this sport too dangerous for (choose your own euphemism) young women/teenage girls/prepubescent 83-pound gravity-defying mites?

Bela Karolyi, the former Romanian coach who now works with Moceanu, leans back in a chair and cackles at the thought.

“This injury of Dominique, it is not a trauma. It is not from a tragic fall,” he says. “It is an injury you can have in any type of athletics. A stress fracture. A routine injury.”

Karolyi’s wife, Martha, also laughs.

“You can get the same thing from too much jogging,” she says.

Karolyi: “This is not an injury that gives me any kind of sign that [gymnastics are] unhealthy. With a short period of rest, a gymnast with this injury can come back in perfect physical shape.”

Two weeks ago, doctors told Moceanu that she could break her leg if she competed in the trials, so “routine injury” remains in the eye of the beholder.

Kathy Scanlan, president of USA Gymnastics, listens to the too-dangerous talk and does not laugh, but she does not concur, either.

“Of course, a gymnastics person would say, ‘No,’ which is the answer I think you would expect,” Scanlan says. “We have 50,000 registered competitive [female] gymnasts in this country, and they compete in everything from beginning level five to elite. Out of those 50,000, we have about 500 competing in our elite program. Out of those, seven ultimately make our Olympic team.

“So, to look at our top gymnasts and say, ‘Oh, here’s a stress fracture or this, that or the other thing’ and try to reflect that back on the other 50,000 is probably not appropriate. Most people involved in gymnastics don’t train at this level, they don’t do these types of tricks, they’re not doing nearly the same degree of difficulty.”

But those who do keep falling and keep getting hurt. Dominique Dawes, fit for these trials, had to limp through the 1992 trials with ankle tendinitis--she qualified, eventually winning a bronze medal--and sat out most of last year because of stress fractures in her foot and wrist. Miller, likewise, did not compete in a full meet for nearly a year leading up to this month’s nationals because of chronic wrist ailments. In order to participate in the 1992 Olympics, she had a screw inserted into her elbow to hold down a bone chip.

Since 1991, two elite American gymnasts have died from causes related to the sport. Julissa Gomez broke her neck on a vault in 1988, spent more than two years in a coma and died of an infection in 1991. Christy Heinrich literally starved herself to death, passing away in 1994 after fighting an eating disorder that began five years earlier when a judge told Heinrich she wouldn’t make the Olympic team unless she lost weight.

Joan Ryan, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, examined both cases, among others, in her 1995 book, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skating.” The book is a harrowing study of abusive coaches, prodding parents and the diminutive victims who are ordered to weigh less and train more so they can jump higher, twist faster and keep those scores climbing.

“These girls are in a race against time,” Ryan says. “They have to become the best in the world before they reach puberty. If they get injured, they aren’t allowed time off to heal, because they don’t have any time. They just have to get through it. You see them popping Advils like candy just to get through a workout.”

Smaller but stronger is the mantra in women’s gymnastics. Aerodynamically correct, it is contradictory to normal human growth patterns. “If you have a very little body shaped like a missile, you’re going to be able to propel yourself higher and turn faster than a woman who has hips and breasts and is heavier,” Ryan says. The ideal physique for a female gymnast? “A boy’s 72-pound body,” Ryan says.

Smaller but stronger can lead to younger gymnasts over-training and older gymnasts under-eating. Either way, the risk of injury invariably increases.

“It’s very easy to over-train in our sport,” says Kathy Johnson Clarke, former Olympic gymnast and current television commentator for ABC. “We not only have to work on technique, but there’s a perfection element in gymnastics that no other sport, except diving and figure skating, has.

“And in diving, it’s only one dive. In our sport, it’s repetition, over and over. The sport is about endurance, strength, perfection. It’s easy to go over the line, to become overzealous.”

Johnson Clarke’s gymnastic career was an anomaly, beginning at age 19 and climaxing at 24 with a 1984 Olympic bronze medal in the balance beam. Because she was older, she felt she had to out-diet the 15-year-olds to keep pace. And, when confronted with an injury at an important meet, she saw no other choice but to gut her way through it, because at the advanced age of 22, there may not be a next important meet.

“I once competed with a stress fracture of the toe joint so bad, my coach had to pull me off the floor,” Johnson Clarke says. “I was dragging a broken foot around, I couldn’t even point my toe, let alone land or take off, but I was still going to go out there before my coach said, ‘Enough’s enough.’

”. . . The sad thing is, a lot of gymnasts don’t see a serious injury coming. Everybody has little aches and pains. But with some of the kids, it’s hard for them to differentiate between pain and discomfort. Discomfort you can live with. Pain is a sign that you have something that’s going to get worse.”

Slowly, the grown-ups have begun to rethink their sport and devise ways to possibly make it safer, if not more sane.

After 1996, the minimum age for female gymnasts competing in the Olympics will be raised from 15 to 16, which sounds like a reasonable first step in the right direction, although Scanlan remains skeptical. “I’m not sure of all the reasons FIG (the Federation of International Gymnastics) changed the rules,” Scanlan says, “but I know one of the reasons is that they want to make sure it is ‘Women’s Gymnastics.’ I’m just not 100% confident we’re going to have less injuries just because you’re going to have older women in the competition.”

Also, the U.S. Olympic Committee has commissioned a USC exercise scientist, Dr. Jill McNitt-Gray, to study landings and takeoffs of world-class gymnasts to see if safety standards can be raised and injuries reduced.

Since beginning her research in 1987, McNitt-Gray estimates she has studied “10,000 landings.” She has found that gymnasts land vaults with a force equivalent to 14 times their body weight and is looking for ways to “dissipate that energy” and “train a person how to prepare her body to handle that kind of load.”

What McNitt-Gray recommends--proper “rest intervals in between loads,” more absorbent landing surfaces--is, she acknowledges, “common sense. Pay attention, and think. Thinking always helps.”

Thinking before one leaps, in particular.

Considering the large stress fracture in Moceanu’s tiny right tibia, Johnson Clarke says she is “hoping for the best. I want her to be in the Olympics, as I know she does. But I also want her to walk.”