November 27, 2013

Women's Olympic ski jumping: The Anorexia of Defeat

As Dave Barry explained about ski jumping, "This exciting sport got its start as a symptom of mental illness in Northern climes such as Norway and Sweden, where it is cold and dark and there is very little to do except pay taxes." The centerpiece of the ancient "Wide World of Sports" opening (video above, 0:13 - 0:17) was a horrific ski jumping crash used to exemplify "the agony of defeat."

As I mentioned awhile ago regarding urban bicycle riding, our society is generally progressing toward greater and greater safety, but some fields seem largely exempt from safety scrutiny for reasons of politics and fashion: cycling is one, and female sports are another.

Since there isn't much disparate treatment by sex left anymore (heck, the Summer Olympics have added women's boxing), in the usual You Go Girl media cheerleading we wind up with lots and lots of disparate impact articles about less than galvanizing topics such as the feminist crisis of women at Harvard Business School blowing off their homework to go on hot dates with eligible bachelors. 

But, Olympic ski jumping really did have disparate treatment. Women weren't allowed to ski jump in the Winter Olympics ... until the 2014 Sochi games! The New York Times Magazine celebrates in the traditional Patriotic Feminist Chauvinist manner that should be familiar from all the other American women's Olympic team fads of recent decades. Mireille Silcoff's article focuses on the American superstar, Sarah Hendrickson (19-years-old and 94 pounds):
WHO SAID GIRLS CAN’T JUMP? 
First there was the struggle to make women’s ski jumping an Olympic sport. Now the American team just wants to win.
... It has been a decade-long fight to get women’s ski jumping into the Olympics — it was one of the last restricted winter sports — and [Sarah] Hendrickson’s outsize talent, a natural ability honed since age 7 that far surpasses that of most male jumpers, was like a banner to parade at the opening ceremony. You said we can’t? Well, look at this. 
... The resistance to women in ski jumping makes frustratingly little sense when you recognize what female jumpers can do. “The gap between men and women in ski jumping is so small, you can’t believe it,” Bernardi told me. “Every year, with girls like Sarah, the girls are flying better, better, better.” Today, he said, there might not actually be another sport in which, at the superelite level, the differences in male and female capability are so minimal. “Maybe there is something with horses? Equestre? But even there it is half the horse.” 
Van said she believed that this is also the reason women have been excluded from the top competitions in the sport for so long. “If women can jump as far as men, what does that do to the extreme value of this sport?” she asks. “I think we scared the ski-jumping [establishment].” 

Ski-jumping is part of Nordic skiing (as opposed to Alpine skiing), and we all know how male chauvinist Nordic cultures are.
There is so little difference between women and men in the sport because lightness and technique count just as much as muscle and power.

But, if you actually read the article, it turns subversive, although, judging from the reader comments, almost nobody notices that. 

The story of America's best hope for gold, 19-year-old, 94-pound Sarah Hendrickson, turns out to be a horrorshow. 

Hendrickson is recovering from a training crash in Germany. She gives the reporter her smart phone with the video of her crash on it, but won't watch it herself.
On the couch next to me, Hendrickson clutched her cardigan sleeves, yawning loudly to miss the horrible clatter of her 94-pound body landing at more than 70 miles an hour on the ground where the jump hill flattens, the area that means you’ve gone too far. 
Hendrickson’s surgeon calls her knee injury “the terrible triad, plus one”: the A.C.L. ruptured completely, the M.C.L. pulled right off the tibia and severe damage was done to both the lateral and medial meniscus.

So, one problem with ski jumping for women is that, as Bob Dylan cruelly said, "But you break just like a little girl."

The NYT Magazine actually ran a fine article in 2008 "The Uneven Playing Field" by Michael Sokolove on why young women get injured more than young men playing the same sports, even sane ones such as soccer. Sokolove expanded it into the book "Warrior Girls: Protecting our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports." The problem is that women tend to be more delicately built than men, so they tend to suffer worse sports injuries.

From the Wikipedia article on Ski Jumping:
Within a few months, in 2013 five female top ski jumpers suffered serious knee injuries and had to withdraw for long recovery periods, thus putting their good chances at the Olympics in Sochi at risk. On 12 January 2013, Daniela Iraschko, the 2011 World Champion, fell in Hinterzarten and withdrew,[14] Anja Tepeš suffered a serious injury on 17 March in Oslo,[15]2013 Cup de France winner Espiau suffered a knee injury in June[16] and on 12 August 2013 Alexandra Pretorius, two-times women's Grand Prix winner, suffered a serious knee injury in Courchevel.[17] On 21 August 2013, Sarah Hendrickson, the 2013 World Champion, suffered a knee ligament damage in Oberstdorf.[18]

But there's more than just crashes:
Increasingly, women are prioritizing lightness as well. ... as the reedlike Hendrickson explained to me, it’s only a matter of time before extreme skinniness becomes the norm on the women’s side as well.

What can possibly go wrong when highly disciplined teenage girls prioritize lightness?
Hendrickson separated a small portion of her tofu curry from the rest and cut it into pea-size pieces. It was hard to tell whether she was dividing her lunch to encourage herself to eat more or less. “I don’t like the feeling of being full,” she said. “I hate it.” She ate the cut-up pieces, then asked to take her soup, rice and remaining tofu home in a doggie bag. She looked at my nearly cleaned plate and asked whether I wanted a doggie bag too, as if the few morsels left could possibly make for a meal. 
Earlier in the season, I watched her lose her usual composure in a hotel lobby when she realized that Bernardi hadn’t told her she could eat dinner early. “You said 8, but I heard some teams got to eat at 6!” she said, stamping a bunny-slippered foot. “You know I hate eating late! You know I never eat late!” 
Since 2004, Federation Internationale de Ski has implemented rules to address concerns about eating disorders among [male] ski jumpers. ...
Hendrickson’s coaches had been concerned enough about her strength to ask her to build “a little more body mass.” She was encouraged to begin eating snacks before bed, and they also wanted her to drink protein shakes.  ...
Throughout this first week back in training in Park City, her teammates suggested that Hendrickson’s rise was causing tension among them. “Sarah’s different than before,” Hughes said. ... And then we have to go through all this stuff on the team, like, ‘Is Sarah happy today, or is she going to start screaming?’” 
“Let’s just put it this way, I know I get cranky when I am under a certain weight,” Jerome said. “And with Sarah, people are just walking on eggshells.” ...
Hendrickson’s biggest obstacle [to recovery from her injuries] now, she said, is strength. “I really need to work on eating enough, even if, because I am not as active, my mind is kind of like, ‘Well, you don’t need food,’ or, ‘I’m not hungry.’ So that’s one of my battles — I just have to eat.” 
For the first six weeks, a physiotherapist brought Hendrickson a smoothie every day at 3 p.m. “And I don’t know what gets put in these smoothies,” she said, laughing. “Because if I made them, they’d probably have half the calories.” 

And then there's this postscript to the article:
Postscript: November 22, 2013 
Coach Paolo Bernardi quit the United States women’s ski jumping team on Thursday after this article went to press. “I resign for personal reasons, and it was a hard decision,” Bernardi wrote on his Facebook page, in a post that has since been deleted. “... I hope to find another team soon that can give me the motivation to start again.” In an email to The Times, Bernardi said the reason for his quitting was “deeper” than only Sarah Hendrickson’s setback, but “of course has a lot to do with Sarah.” 

If you read the article closely with an open mind, you might come to the conclusion that the conventional wisdom is wrong: Combine the brutal injuries with ski jumping's incentives to become anorexic and this sounds like a terrible sport to encourage American girls to take up.

In fact, a remarkable percentage of the best New York Times articles are like that. The NYT employs smart, hardworking reporters. If you read their output closely enough and they often wind up undermining The Narrative. 

But almost nobody ever notices ...

63 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just google imaged Sarah Hendrickson. Wow, what a beautiful girl!! If she just lost 5 lbs she'd be perfect.

Dan in DC

Anonymous said...

Just google imaged Sarah Hendrickson.

What a beta creep.

agnostic said...

Something that conservatives don't notice in these stories is how they're mostly a red state phenomenon. That follows from a conservative culture encouraging physical rather than cerebral competition.

The worst example is the acrobatic cheerleading of the South, promoted by psycho "cheer moms."

Hendrickson was born and raised in Utah (though in a city, so more liberal than the surrounding area, but still more conservative than East Coast cities).

The military fathers who want or don't shy away from their daughters taking a stab at playing Xena Warrior Princess in the army or marines.

It's hard to interpret the rise of these things as part of a liberal feminist agenda. They get more into cerebral causes, and try to push around girls who are not related to them -- the "Women in Science" hustlers and bullies at the universities being a good example. Liberals are way more afraid of physical harm coming to women.

The "girls can get tough too!" phenomenon comes from conservatives, promotes no broader agenda, and takes the form of parents pushing their daughters to boost the family's reputation and status.

It's a form of helicopter parenting mixed with "amoral familism," to use Edward Banfield's description of the code of backward Southern Italy.

Anonymous said...

Wikipedia shows Sarah's longest jump as 126m. Looking at the world records for ski jumping I notice that she indeed has bested a world record holder in the ski jump. His name is Willi Gantschnigg. His jump of 124m is just short of Ms. Hendrickson's best. So, indeed the women are catching up to the men at a very rapid rate in this sport. Willi's jump was recorded in 1950. She's almost made it to the new millenium. Bravo, sweetie, bravo!

Also from wikipedia; "Hendrickson is the last of five top female jumpers who, within a few months, had a bad fall and had to rest forcedly for a long recovery period".

Top 5 females are out due to injury and might not compete in 2014.

You go girl indeed!

Anonymous said...

The article says:

Women are allowed to start from a higher point on the jump because of their lighter weight (for heavier women, this can be an advantage).

Then it says that women jump about the same distances as men. But if women are allowed to start from a higher point, the jumps aren’t comparable. It’s like saying that women and men run the 100 meter sprint equally fast if women get a 20 meter head start.

The starting point in ski jumping is one of the chief determinants of jump length. It is chosen so that the best competitors jump as far as it is safe to do, but not farther. Not uncommonly, the wind conditions are so favorable that even the weaker competitors jump dangerously far. In such cases, the starting point is lowered and everybody has to redo their jumps.

Women being lighter than men may give them an advantage in ski jumping, but the takeoff is also crucial and men obviously have an advantage there. (Just compare men's and women's results in the jump events of track & field, e.g., the oldest men's record in long jump -- from 1901 -- is superior to the current women's record.) The fact that women start from a higher point means that the organizers acknowledge that ski jumping is just another sport where women cannot compete with men.

DYork said...

About female body size, have you noticed the average top female tennis player? Or downhill skier?

They're all pretty much Amazons.

Anonymous said...

Just google imaged Sarah Hendrickson. Wow, what a beautiful girl!!

Wow, what a beta creep!!

Anonymous said...



WHO SAID GIRLS CAN’T JUMP?


Jumping does not seem to be the problem. Landing is.

stari_momak said...

Whatever happened to the Kenyan cross country skiers? How about the Jamaican bob sledders?

Anonymous said...

It’s like saying that women and men run the 100 meter sprint equally fast if women get a 20 meter head start.

You would not believe the amount of people who claim that women are catching up with men because women run the 100 meters hurdles over 36 inch hurdles quicker than men can run the 110 meters hurdles over 42" hurdles.

FirkinRidiculous said...

Gravity's a bitch.

Steve, did you see this new Ayers' claim of authorship for DFMF?

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-obama-care/112613-680812-bill-ayers-claims-authorship-of-obama-dreams-memoir.htm

Anonymous said...

Last night, following in Steve's footsteps, AoSHQ had an outstanding piece on the lunacy of modern bicycling.

I frigging hate bicyclers.

Bicyclists. WTFE.

Frigging loathe and despise them.

stari_momak said...

Gotta love this comment by NYT reader Carol from Philadelphia.

"Maybe we can learn from these ladies and apply similar courage and determination when seeking for solutions to climate change and rising carbon dioxide emissions.”

God these people are idiots.

freudwasrightaboutafewthings said...

Carol's just pulling your leg.

Lastango said...

An excellent article about women-vs-men on the playing field. Well worth a read... really cuts through the phony PC hype:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/225402/olympian-political-correctness/todd-gallagher

Dahlia said...

Agnostic said,
Something that conservatives don't notice in these stories is how they're mostly a red state phenomenon. That follows from a conservative culture encouraging physical rather than cerebral competition.

The worst example is the acrobatic cheerleading of the South, promoted by psycho "cheer moms."
---------

When I was in middle and high school, there weren't psycho cheer moms. The divide was between Cheerleading Moms and Dance Team Moms. There were far more slots for dancers and, unfortunately, they were seen as cooler and were far, far sexier.
There wasn't this huge divide between the girls and they were friendly with each other, but I remember the Queen of the Mean Girls was always either captain or co-captain of the dance team (of around 40 girls) for all those years. Personally, I was never that close with any of the dancers, though most were nice, but had close friendships with the cheerleaders. So, there was a difference.

Moms and daughters were far more about being the coolest and *sexiest*, not most athletic.
The cheerleaders and their mothers had more class and were more wholesome; their mothers wouldn't even allow them try out for Dance Team.
The South has more tolerance for overt sexuality, especially in dancing, as seen with Elvis, but the Dance Team stuff was over the top and it seems to have become more and more a low-class phenomenon over the years since.

PropagandistHacker said...

sailer wrote: "in the usual You Go Girl media cheerleading...."


Hey, quit knocking feminism. It produces stonger and more assertive women, er, I mean wymen, er, wimmen.

Well, anyway, more assertive women means more women competing with men in the labor market, which means more supply of labor, which means lower wages and that means more corporate profits, which can then be spent on more advertising for the corporation in the media.
Also, it means more consumers and spending, which means more corporate profits, which means more ads in the media.


So, you see, it's all for the Greater Good. Now get with the program!

Modern Abraham said...


There is so little difference between women and men in the sport because lightness...


This sentence brought an image immediately to mind- perfection in this sport is achieved by making your body as close in density and proportion to a chicken wing bone as humanly possible.

“And I don’t know what gets put in these smoothies,” she said, laughing. “Because if I made them, they’d probably have half the calories.”

Instead of a drug test for these athletes, how about a rag test? Have at least one period between opening and closing ceremonies, or be disqualified from medal competition and automatically be entered in the girls' auxiliary junior demonstration wing instead.

Wait, only Bible Belt cretins still believe healthy, adult women have periods. Sorry, I feel so embarrassed now for showing my squalid origins.

Anonymous said...

Combine the brutal injuries with ski jumping's incentives to become anorexic

And unfortunately, the latter also drives the former. Less weight = lose muscles = bone tissue loss = more serious injuries.

Harry Baldwin said...

Anonymous said... I frigging hate bicyclers.

I bet you're fat.

Anonymous said...

"I bet you're fat."

I think he is a driver.

Modern Abraham said...

Just to maybe make my comment a little less cryptic-

Elite male athletes (depending on sport and position, of course, but let's say football running back) often have body fat ratios of 3%. Once a woman's body fat ratio goes below somewhere in the teens (forget if it's 12% or 15%) her body will completely shut down the menstruation cycle. Of course, only a moron who doesn't understand everything is a social construct would believe that by definition is unhealthy.

sunshinemary said...

If feminists really cared about women, they would want girls to know about their increased risk of sustaining a sports injury relative to boys. The fact that they would rather engage in you-go-girl-isms is just another piece of evidence that feminism is about power and not about improving women's lives. They will happily throw women under the bus to accomplish their aims. Pathetic.

And where are Sarah Hendrickson's parents, one wonders.

Anonymous said...

Once a woman's body fat ratio goes below somewhere in the teens (forget if it's 12% or 15%) her body will completely shut down the menstruation cycle. Of course, only a moron who doesn't understand everything is a social construct would believe that by definition is unhealthy.

This is something that I have long worried about for the serious competitive swimmers - the chicks who finance an NCAA Div I edumakashun by swimming [really hard grueling nauseating swimming] for four years on a school's swim team.

I know from personal experience [ahem] that pretty much all of them are at risk of losing their periods for up to six months at a time, if not longer.

And I have heard anecdotally that they can have a very difficult time when they try to conceive and bear children, later in life.

I'd love to see some hard TFR stats on that - looking at, say, AIAW/NCAA chicks, from the 1970s/1980s, who are now entering into menopause [barren-ness], and compare their lifetime TFRs with representative samples of their classmates who were not NCAA Div I athletes.

Heck, you wouldn't have to limit it to just swimming - but I bet that swimming and long distance running take the worst toll on the chicks' bodies.

PS: And yes, I still frigging loath and despise all of you bike-riding spandex-wearing ****-******* ******s.

Anonymous said...

Women must pick up on the fact that men like me consider women to be hotter as they get thinner, and they have to be very, very thin before their attractiveness wanes. On the other hand, if a woman puts an extra five or ten pounds around the middle, her desirability plummets - same goes for even the slightest double chin.

I can't defend having this proclivity-as they say ,"I can't change/ even if I tried/ even if I wanted to."

I will try to atone by saying that most sports, especially Olympic sports, bore the hell out of me, except for games like, the now defunct, softball, where people with a broad spectrum of body types and abilities compete with low risk and a lot of camaraderie, even though such events don't advance the species, or do they?

Auntie Analogue said...


Explain to us how women ski jumpers starving themselves to gain an edge in their sport is different from male athletes gobbling PED's to gain an edge in their sports? Ever heard of Lyle Alzado and the rest of the PED freaks who suffered early and died young from their obsession with gaining an edge? And how is women starving themselves to gain an edge different from Michael Phelps gorging on 12,000 calories of pasta to carbo-load himself for his Beijing swims?

On the other hand there's Usain Bolt going gluttonous Chicken McNuggets.

Every time I gaze upon mankind I'm reminded of the refrain of a 1960's tune by Four Jacks & A Jill: "It's a strange, strange world we live in, Master Jack."

NOTA said...

This is probably me being middle aged and wanting all the damn fool kids to get off my lawn, but I just don't get the point of these sports where basically every serious athlete gets seriously injured as a matter of course. Why not make Russian roulette an Olympic sport? Or dueling?

Anonymous said...

Women must pick up on the fact that men like me consider women to be hotter as they get thinner, and they have to be very, very thin before their attractiveness wanes.


You're an atypical man.

Mountain Maven said...

I think Auntie Analogue gets it. The competitiveness is sports is out of control. When I was a kid i knew only a few over the top athletes, mostly swimmers. But now it's in every sport. The obsession with success in one narrow disciple to the exclusion of the rest of life, the grueling training, terrible injuries, the PEDs. Of course we have it in the rest of life's competitive pursuits, getting into college (Adderall for SAT tests), climbing the ladder at work.
But I'm just a retired Type B guy.

Blake's-77 said...

Liberalism teaches women that they can do anything men can do. And when it turns out that they can't, lawyers are there to take advantage:

Three female RAF recruits are to be paid compensation for injuries reportedly suffered while marching alongside male colleagues. They claimed parading alongside taller male recruits caused them to over-stride and develop spinal and pelvic injuries, the Mail on Sunday reported. It is understood they will receive £100,000 from the MoD.

Female RAF recruits paid compensation for marching injuries

Anonymous said...

Expect that you could fit all the world's women ski jumpers in one not so large room

But that is both gender/sex equality and the winter olympics for you -the bar for an events inclusion is so so much lower for the winter games . I note that the winter games now has about a third of the number of events of the summer games which is frankly ridiculous

Anonymous said...

You're an atypical man.

I don't think so. I think I reflect the typical white male perspective. Let me restate my idea of too thin: too thin is when a woman loses her feminine proportions. As I have said on other threads, I think most anorexics do not have feminine bodies, they start with thick mannish bodies and they try to narrow their waists to establish curves, but the curves never come, and in the process they starve. If they get therapy and put some weight back on, they tend go back to having thick mannish bodies. It just might be healthier to let women change their bodies with surgery instead of diet - let them have the rib removed, the breasts and butt enhanced, and a little liposuction when needed-it is probably easier than getting them to adjust their poor self-image. Imagine if plastic surgeons were seen as life-savers after all these years of being vilified. Give me an example of what your 'typical' male finds attractive, and I will bet that she is using diet, and/or surgery to maintain that image.

George said...

Those European ski resorts have such cool names.

Anonymous said...

Competition in sports increased in a direct relationship to the growth in the money available. If you're a good player who has a shot at a pro career, and you see the difference between being a short-term benchwarmer earning the league minimum and a 15-year starter earning $6 million a year is dabbling in the PED arts, what do you think is going to happen? Or the natural solid player with the potential, with the drugs, to go from being the $6 million guy to the $20 million star (Braun, Ortiz and Rodriguez immediately come to mind)? As Jim Bouton wrote 45 years ago in Ball Four, if you told a pitcher you had a pill that would guarantee 20 wins a year but would take 10 years off his life, you'd be hard-pressed to find one who wouldn't take it.

As soon as the Olympic athlete progressed from the Wheaties box being the only endorsement money source to the multi-million dollars Visa ads that Michael Phelps did, it upped the ante in ALL sports.

My girlfriend was a 800-meter swimmer for a D3 school, and she says there was no middle ground with the girls on the team. Most were watching every mouthful of food to gauge the right balance to maintain optimal weight without passing out during workouts, while the lucky ones like her with good metabolisms were eating 4,000 calories a day for the same reason.

Hunsdon said...

Auntie Analogue said:
Explain to us how women ski jumpers starving themselves to gain an edge in their sport is different from male athletes gobbling PED's to gain an edge in their sports?

Hunsdon said: Women are more valuable than men.

Anonymous said...

It’s weird how these stories about women being allowed to compete in some traditional male sport are touted as examples of there being no sex differences. Yet ski jumping and just about all other sports serve only to underscore the physical inferiority of women. In sports, the standards of performance are usually completely objective and transparent, so women can’t even claim that their weaker performance is due to some invisible form of discrimination. Also, I think these claims about parity between men and women in some sport usually come from feminists who know little about any sport, rather than from female athletes themselves.

Anonymous said...

>Top 5 females are out due to injury and might not compete in 2014.

Turkish joke: Temel and Dursun were competing to find out who could overhang from the balcony furthest. Incidentally; Temel, may his soul rest in peace, has won.

Anonymous said...

I want to know Steve's take on the similarities and differences between Ski Jumping and Plunge for Distance, in which buoyancy and technique count just as much as muscle and power, and sportsmen look like their shakes would have twice the calories, if they made them themselves.

I believe, most of the appeal of ski jumping is the possibility of a fall, like car racing and unlike plunge for distance. [DISCLAIMER: I watch none of the above.]

blogger said...

"In fact, a remarkable percentage of the best New York Times articles are like that. The NYT employs smart, hardworking reporters. If you read their output closely enough and they often wind up undermining The Narrative."

In this case, not quite.

As reporters, it is their job to report on the various aspects of an issue, and some are gonna be unpleasant. But this goes for any story.
Boxing is very dangerous for men too. A lot of men break down in all sorts of competition. But being free means having the choice to take the risks.

Same goes with women. Yes, there are risks--even bigger ones--for them, but if they want to compete too, well, they should have the freedom to take risks.

----------

The bigger problem with injuries in sports is that bicycling and skateboarding have become trick stunts, and so many young people try to do really risky things.
When I was young, people rode bikes to go from A to B. Skateboards were something kids rode for fun.

Now, a lot of kids are into something like this:

http://youtu.be/vPFbGNkGcE0

Anonymous said...

Guys are built sturdier but also 'tard'ier.

They are more prone to do things like this:

http://youtu.be/6Gy1G2i92Ss

http://youtu.be/cVbRtk7wWAA

Pat Boyle said...

I had a crazy friend in college who was in Special Forces. Bob told me that when the troops lined up to get into the planes that would drop them so as to fulfill their parachute requirement, you could always tell the 'Jump Masters' - the guys with the most jumps. They were, he said, the ones who were crying.

Military parachute jumping hurts. It damages your knees. In fact your whole skeleton is stressed. This isn't so true for civilian jumping because the rate of descent is so much less. You want to come down as fast as possible when they are shooting at you.

The same I'm told is true for ski jumping. Some pro football players retire without ever having been hurt - but that's not true of those in the military who were 'air borne' or big time ski jumpers. Every landing brings damage.

Albertosaurus

Mountain Maven said...

Three female RAF recruits

Unfortunately the decline of the UK is a predictor of where the US will end up.

Anonymous said...

On Hurdles I thought possible Winter Olympian Lolo Jones tweet* was based on her knowledge of the difference between different types of athletes having different specialties rather than as a put down on a disabled athlete but I must defer to the media's greater knowledge.

*"Get Checked for a concussion. Clearly, u've been hit in the head... Cos u arnt beating a track athlete."

Anonymous said...

Michael Phelps gorging on 12,000 calories of pasta to carbo-load himself for his Beijing swims?
Well, when you workout 12,000 to 15,000 meters a day in heavy training you can do that but Michael didn't do that when he swam in London. Swimming unlike track burns out on the heavy mileage young. Katy Ledkecky like Janet Evans peak in the 800 and 1,500 as a teenager. As for swimmers doing a lot of yardage it came in the 1970's when goggles were made to use in workouts before that time few clubs did double workouts. For example, the 100 meter butterfly winner in women's in 1972 was only 1:03 and in 2012 at 55.8 which is the world record. In 1972 you could get a bronze medal on the men's side.

DanJ said...

Successful men in ski jumping are very skinny too, and some of them probably anorectic.

On the face of it, ski jumping might actually be a sport where women could compete with men. You need to be lightweight, and have an exeptional sense of timing and coordinaton to succeed.

Huge muscles does you no good, but you must make the most of every muscle fiber when jumping, and the knees do take a beating when you touch down.

Anonymous said...

Why can't people just encourage girls to do non-risky sports? We have the liberal feminists on one side who encourage girls to do rugby and ski-jumping; we have tradcons/HBDers/manospherians on the other side who want girls to not do sports at all. Why can't we encourage girls to do safer activities such as table tennis, badminton, volleyball, archery, fencing, and shooting? As for winter sports, curling seems to be safer than the rest.

Anonymous said...

Took the kids to Disney World last spring. Saw many, many teen girls athletic teams also visiting the parks while we were there. Without exception, each group had at least one, if not more , girls on crutches or wearing massive leg braces.

Bill said...

I was at a jumping competiton at the Holmenkollbakken in Oslo where a guy got blown off course and flew into the crowd, killing a spectator. I was there when they were jumping in the fog, too.

I wonder what kind of a father would encourage his daughter to get involved in that sport. I'd flat out forbid it.

Anonymous said...

I wonder what kind of a father would encourage his daughter to get involved in that sport. I'd flat out forbid it.

Not all fathers are sexist like you are. It's pathetic that you have to indulge in sexism to feel like a man.

Anonymous said...

My girlfriend was a 800-meter swimmer for a D3 school, and she says there was no middle ground with the girls on the team. Most were watching every mouthful of food to gauge the right balance to maintain optimal weight without passing out during workouts, while the lucky ones like her with good metabolisms were eating 4,000 calories a day for the same reason.
Well, it happens in swimming too as you age its harder to get those pounds off. I can see college girls watching their calories more so than high school. In fact about 30 years ago, an elite swimmer T Cohen had passed out from not eating much. Sports are tougher on girls to keep weight down. as for the south, they have more sports for girls than the Northeast, so they are not opposed to girls doing sports because they have periods. i did sports and periods made it not fun.

Anonymous said...

The worst example is the acrobatic cheer leading of the South, promoted by psycho "cheer moms."
California should be be the queen of that but Pyramids became illegal to do in high school.

Anonymous said...

Of course, only a moron who doesn't understand everything is a social construct would believe that by definition is unhealthy.

Actually, its not as bad as you think. Girls that have periods later on better off and don't have kids at such a young age and our healthier. Once you leave sports you have regular periods. Sports are good since they delayed the on set of periods. i had a period at 13 because I swam as a kid while it normal today for girls to start under 11 years old. In fact the earlier you start the more likely you become pregnant, early periods bring maturely too early and sexual involvement earlier sometimes. Lots of girls today have periods at 9,10 and 11 too young, sports will up it to 12,13 and 14.

Anonymous said...

Other studies have shed light on racial differences in precocious puberty, with African-American girls maturing earlier as a group than white girls. There are also some racial differences among boys.
Blacks and Hispanics are less likely to be involved in sports than white girls, so maybe a reason why they have kids young.

Harry Baldwin said...

Anonymous said...Let me restate my idea of too thin: too thin is when a woman loses her feminine proportions. As I have said on other threads

Can't expect anyone to know what you've said on other threads when you post as Anonymous.

Anonymous said...

I have had a few glasses of Thanksgiving wine, but I'm pretty sure this is one of the more incomprehensible comments ever on isteve. Maybe the author had a few too.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...Let me restate my idea of too thin: too thin is when a woman loses her feminine proportions. As I have said on other threads
I was not too thin a little on the chunky this size that's why I swam breaststroke. Your problem is you think that every girl that does sports is too thin not true. Its a problem with elite sports people in sports more. Your problem is that you want girls to not do any sports and called back to the 1950's. The problem today is more girls are heavy than too thin and more girls have periods to young compared to the 1950's.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

Not all fathers are sexist like you are. It's pathetic that you have to indulge in sexism to feel like a man."

It's pathetic that you have to indulge in feminism to feel like a woman. And, by the way, that goes double if you actually happen to be a man.

Fathers are supposed to be concerned about thier daughter's well-being. Steering them away from a dead-end career that involves lots of danger and virtually no pay-off seems like a wise thing for a loving father to do.

Anonymous said...

California should be be the queen of that...

1) There aren't any whites left in Kalifornia.

...but Pyramids became illegal to do in high school.

2) Okay, now that's just blatant discrimination against the Reconquista.

d..... said...

I'm surprised that no one has brought up ballet so I will.

There are still plenty of little girls who wanna be a ballerina when they grow up. There's something very appealing about tulle, tutus, toe shoes, and tiaras to a little girl. Little girls now wearing a fluffy tutu as every day wear. This was not done back in the bad old days of pre-feminist patriarchy, think about that. Of course, feminists blame it all on Disney, but that's crap. They love it.

Of course, very few of them will stick with it, past the early stages, when they discover it's hard. Most will drop out after that first traumatic encounter with toe shoes. Pretty to look at, ugly to wear. And after a while, your feet are hideous.

If you are "lucky" enough to become a professional dancer, you'll find work/life balance very hard, although some have done it well (Melissa Hayden) most have found it impossible (Allegra Kent). The injury rate is 90%. A few ballerinas have had long careers without serious injury but they are vanishingly rare and all are names from the past when the stress and competitition levels were lower.

Oddly, the one area where ballet has improved is in the area of eating disorders. By the 1970s/80s, eating disorders were rampant in the ballet world. Then a reaction set in. There was no reason for such skeletal thinness beyond an extreme twisted aesthetic ideal. Nowadays most of the principal female dancers of the New York City ballet have lean but feminine body types.

http://tinyurl.com/qz86odl

Black Swan was entertaining but dated in this respect.

I think that pressuring girls into these extreme sports is horrifying, but the guy who mentioned Lyle Alzado was right. What does it say about America that our sports heroes are PE'd freaks?

Pat Boyle said...

Other studies have shed light on racial differences in precocious puberty, with African-American girls maturing earlier as a group than white girls. There are also some racial differences among boys.

That's why it was so silly for Sharpton, the media, and the prosecution to keep referring to Trayvon Martin as a 'child'. Had he been white he would have been a child but he was only a month or two under 18. Modern black teens are adults at 17.

Lyle Alzado was a singular case. He indeed did kill himself for sports but in a unique way. He injected Human Growth Hormone (HGH) so as to get big. But HGH in those days was only available from cadavers. They harvested the pituitary glands of the dead. It was very expensive so it was not common. It also took a lot of glands and brain tissue to yield enough HGH.

Alzado seems to have contracted spongiform encephalopathy - something like 'Mad Cow Disease' or scrapie in sheep. Human cannibals like New Zeeland head hunters get a similar disease called 'Kuru'. In all cases it seems to be contracted from eating the nervous tissue of others of your species.

BTW I can't find any verification of this account in Wikipedia so maybe the story I once read is false or an urban legend, but it makes sense to me.

Speaking of weight gain. I'm reminded that chimps in labs are also getting heavier. They eat the same diets as before (Purina's Chimp Chow) but they and other lab animals everywhere are getting heavier. It's got to be 'Global Warming' I guess.

Albertosaurus

Anonymous said...

Speaking of women's sports, here are some highlights from women's dirt bike racing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73vOI6hj1dE

Isabel said...

"We have the liberal feminists on one side who encourage girls to do rugby and ski-jumping;"

Evidence? this has been asserted over and over here but where is the evidence any feminists are pushing girls into dangerous sports?

"Of course, feminists blame it all on Disney, but that's crap. They love it."

Evidence for this? That feminists blame it all on Disney, that Disney bears no responsibility for the trend, or that feminists "love it"?

"It's pathetic that you have to indulge in feminism to feel like a woman."

This is not why anyone "indulges" in feminism so it's a pretty pathetic comeback.

Steve Sailer and his minions clearly have mommy issues. :)

Anonymous said...

Human cannibals like New Zeeland head hunters get a similar disease called 'Kuru'.

Papua New Guinea?