"Why do these men want to coach little girls?"

Former national champ Jennifer Sey exposes the anorexia and sexual and mental abuse that are rampant in elite women's gymnastics.

By Julia Wallace

Read more: Sports, Olympics, Eating Disorders, Gymnastics, Life, Jennifer Sey

April 23, 2008 | In the years between Mary Lou Retton's historic victory at the 1984 Olympics and Kim Zmeskal's dominance in the early 1990s, American gymnastics was in a bad way. Most of our gymnasts lacked the finesse of their counterparts in Eastern Bloc states like Russia and Romania, where children were plucked from their homes almost as soon as they could walk, and U.S. coaches struggled to produce another breakout star. Jennifer Sey was one of their best hopes.

At 15, Sey left her New Jersey home for the Parkettes National Gymnastic Training Center in Allentown, Pa., where she boarded alone in an unheated room in exchange for a chance to become a champion. Under the tutelage of Bill and Donna Strauss, a husband-and-wife coaching team notorious for producing winners by any means necessary, she accomplished just that -- nabbing the U.S. National title in 1986. But Sey was never quite talented or powerful enough to be hailed as the second coming of Retton and eventually, burned out by the pressure to stay skinny and the pain of competing on barely healed broken bones, she retired.

In her new memoir, "Chalked Up," Sey recounts the casual brutality of the sport to which she devoted her childhood. There was the coach who hurled a folding chair at a girl who couldn't perform a difficult maneuver on the uneven bars, and the one who used the gym's loudspeaker to humiliate a 10-year-old for gaining one pound. Sey herself spent the last few years of her career on a fruit and laxative diet, working out for eight hours a day while recovering from a series of increasingly nasty injuries, including a clean break of the femur, the strongest bone in the body. Eating disorders were rampant in the sport, and physical and sexual abuse not uncommon, despite -- or perhaps because of -- the fact that women's gymnastics is dominated by little girls.

Sey spoke with Salon by phone from her home in San Francisco.

What struck me when reading your book was how incredibly hard it is to protect young gymnasts when there are so many incentives for coaches and other adults not to act in the kids' best interests.

I think this is tied to our culture as a whole and how we prioritize winning over everything else. That's why you see steroid use. It's even related to corporate malfeasance -- winning is the most important thing, so the ends justify the means. The problem is exacerbated in gymnastics, because the girls are so young that they're ripe to be taken advantage of. It doesn't happen all the time -- I was just writing about what my experience has been -- but it is a powder keg of circumstances.

Is it possible that you were just the victim of rogue coaches? I know the Parkettes Training Center has a particularly bad reputation -- it was even the subject of an unflattering CNN documentary in 2003.

[This behavior] is endemic to the sport. I think my coaches employed some tactics in my training that were pretty tough to take, pretty aggressive and harsh. They were known at the time for being incredibly tough on us about our weight, which I think has been tempered over the years. But I wouldn't want to make any sort of judgment that they're better or worse than anyone else. I think their perspective is, "You come to us to become champions, and this is what will be required."

Were they actively encouraging you to develop an eating disorder?

Yes, absolutely. I don't think they would say, "Go throw up," or "We want you to be anorexic," but the fact is that they were asking us to do things that were impossible without engaging in behaviors that were dangerous. People weren't quite as sophisticated in their understanding of eating disorders then as they are now, so I don't know if they understood that there were long-term psychological and physical effects.

Back in the early '90s, Christy Henrich, whom I competed with, died from anorexia. She'd been told that she wasn't a viable athlete at the weight she was competing at, and she proceeded to whittle herself down to about 55 pounds. There was sort of an outcry, and the sport came under scrutiny for that, and there has been a shift, which is great. I also think the skills [today] are so incredibly difficult that they require a lot of power, and that has prompted a change. The sport can be a bit trendy, and certain body types come in and out -- I hope this one sticks, but we'll see.

I'm fascinated by what made your coaches Bill and Donna Strauss tick -- you portray them as so nasty to the young girls in their care, and so oblivious to their mental and physical health. Does it bother you that they're still coaching kids?

I was willing to take [the abuse] because I wanted to win. So I don't actually have a problem with them coaching. What I would like is for the methods they employ around weight to be modified -- that wreaks havoc on young girls. I would like for there to be some guidelines for no training while you're injured. I called [the Strausses] out because they were my coaches, but I don't think they are so different from others who coach at the highest levels today. What made them tick was that they wanted girls who won, they wanted their club to be the best, and that clouded their vision.

You portray the Parkettes team doctor, Dr. Dixon, as something of a charlatan, a man who deferred to your coaches about medical decisions and sent you back to the gym to train with a concussion in one instance, a freshly broken ankle in another.

The way he would probably present himself is that he aided you in getting back to your goal. It's easy to look back and say that as a doctor, he should have had my physical and mental health at heart, but he saw my best interests as getting me back into the gym so I could compete and win. I think that most orthopods and specialists who treat high-level athletes are probably very similar. If you talk to the doctor for the San Francisco 49ers, they probably send people into play who aren't 100 percent. What made the situation unique is that we were children.

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