Why Are We So Obsessed With Gymnasts?
Before I even knew what it was, I was watching gymnastics. This was back in the 1970s, when you could find gymnasts on TV only every four years for the Summer Olympics, but those few weeks made a powerful mark. I can still recall sprawling on the shag carpet of my childhood home, face propped on my hands, watching tiny, lithe, grave-faced Nadia Comaneci on our rickety, pre-cable television set. Nadia. Her darting body, that searing white leotard, her dark intensity.
Although too young to appreciate her legendary 1976 perfect-10 turn, I watched the Moscow Olympics in 1980 with singular devotion as Nadia made a triumphant return: cooler, more sophisticated, battle-tested, and thus even more compelling. Far more so than American gymnast Cathy Rigby's sweet blond girlness, Nadia's model of '70s girlhood-quiet, determined, with seeming hidden depths-lingered strongly for me ever after.
So it would be for me every four years into adulthood and right up to Rio: embracing the spectacle as the female gymnasts dominate the Olympic stage. Of course, there are legions of us-our eyes locked to TVs and now to our computers, our phones, our tablets. With the rise of social media, we can share our devotion with one another and, thrillingly, the gymnasts themselves: on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, on the whole, sweeping "gymternet." So many women (and many men) laying their feelings-admiration and awe, judgment and envy-at the feet of these young athletes.
But what is it about the gymnast that so transfixes us? Many of us come to them first when we are young girls and they are young girls. Before the 1970s, Olympic gymnasts were frequently in their twenties or beyond. But beginning with gymnasts like Ludmilla Tourischeva, a 16-year-old dynamo at the 1968 Olympics, and Nadia, who was just 14 during her gold medal turn in 1976, female Olympic gymnasts began to be, much more commonly, girls. It's physics, after all; it's the competitive edge a smaller, younger body promises.
And so you have Nadia and Mary Lou Retton and later, tinier and tinier, Dominique Moceanu and Shawn Johnson and Kim Zmeskal. While the age limit for gymnasts was raised to 15 in 1981 and to 16 in 1997, the changing demands of the sport often meant 16-year-olds who looked even younger, who exuded in some way: girl. Except not. Because these were tough girls, iron-willed. Who can forget Kerri Strug vaulting on an injured ankle to ensure the 1996 U.S. team's Olympic gold?
They were girls when we were little girls, and they remain so, renewing themselves every four years. But our notions of girlhood have changed. Twenty years ago, "girl" was, to some, a diminishing pejorative before being repurposed in recent years as rallying cry-and perhaps these gymnasts beat us to it. They showed us-before Riot Grrrls and Girl Power, and long before Beyoncé pronounced that girls run the world-that there was nothing fragile, nothing delicate, nothing small about girlness. Consider the ripped physiques of the 2012 Fierce Five's proto-girl-squad and 2016's even more swaggering and thrillingly diverse team, led by the extraordinary Simone Biles. Today's gymnast stars express their own ambitions openly and with abandon. "Breaking history is kind of cool," tweeted Biles last October when she became the first woman in history to win three consecutive all-around titles at the World Gymnastics Championships.
Because now, of course, these gymnasts are girls but also, and foremost, powerful and blazingly talented women. Perhaps that is the paradox that keeps us rapt. Biles, four feet nine inches tall, in a pink, crystal-studded leotard and with that cherubic face, radiates girl. And yet the instant she takes glorious flight, she is beyond reckoning, defying gravity, logic, reason. Best of all, she seems to know it, and to know the head game required. As she told The New Yorker, preparing for competition means "repeatedly convincing yourself you aren't going to die." The girl Simone smiles at us winningly as we roar our adulation, but the woman Simone knows the emotional cost, the psychic gymnastics required to offer us the stuff of dreams.
The instant she takes glorious flight, she is beyond reckoning, defying gravity, logic, reason.
Our fascination with the gymnast, then, is not just cultural. It's personal, too-intensely so. By looking at the Olympic stars who struck our consciousness, we can see a map of our own development. I think about myself and Nadia. By the time Mary Lou Retton performed her star five-medal turn at the '84 Olympics, I was on the cusp of surly adolescence. I remember watching her with my parents and grandparents during summer vacation and bristling at her relentlessly perky image, her forever-smile. I longed for Nadia's coolness, both earnest and enigmatic. But I suppose I knew on some level what was going to be expected of girls in the go-go eighties: smiling, bouncing, a Wheaties box come to life.
Many gymnast-loves followed for me, but Nadia still looms largest. So it's only natural that I returned to her when I found myself writing a novel about a young gymnast. The novel's steely center is 15-year-old Devon Knox, a gymnast since the age of three. As I wrote her, I found myself telescoping back and forth in time to all the gymnasts I watched over the years, from Mary Lou and Shannon Miller to Dominique Dawes and Aly Raisman. But the novel's title, You Will Know Me, comes from Nadia. My first. Her strange and wonderful memoir, Letters to a Young Gymnast, is written in the guise of a letter to an aspiring gymnast seeking advice. In the opening pages, Nadia tells the gymnast, the reader, me, "Take my hand when I falter, for I cannot make this journey alone. I do not know you, but you will know me."
These lines perhaps resonate with all of us who are riveted by the Olympic gymnasts every four years. What if we were able to talk to the first gymnast who ever enthralled us? What might she say? Is there something she might tell us about who we are and who we could be? Can't you picture it? There she is, the Olympian, the experienced, time-tested woman and the forever-girl, offering her mighty hand to us, promising answers, assuring us we're taking this journey together.
