Gymnastics Deserves To Take A Jab

You women have a point.

Yes, you - you women who won’t watch boxing, who NBC surmises chalk up like Shannon Miller for a firmer grip on the TV remote and click over to “Cybill” if Bob Costas is ever heard to utter, “From gymnastics, let’s go to the boxing ven …”

So he never does.

(You other women who may actually like boxing, well, NBC has a stack of market research Dan O’Brien couldn’t pole vault over concluding you don’t exist. Or don’t own a TV. Same thing.)

Boxing is brutal. Warlike. Sleazy. Icky. You have a point.

So let’s go to the boxing ven … OK, I’ll go for you.

I am watching the judges screw over unfortunate little Americans and Germans. There are hoots and whistles from the experts up high. Preening coaches exult and protest. Oily promoters and leechy agents trawl the wings, looking for their next cut.

Wait. Those are my notes from gymnastics.

I am at the boxing venue, but I keep thinking about Kerri Strug.

I am thinking about her because she’s the only athlete at these Games I recall being urged to go out there and hurt herself.

At least these guys are encouraged to duck.

True, Strug would have made her courageous final vault without her coaches telling her, “Tough, get going.” She believed a gold medal to be at stake - and not only the U.S. team’s gold, but one of her very own. She wasn’t going to win any further medals accepting a score in the low 9s for skidding on her bum.

It’s hard to know what was going to hurt worse: her ankle if she vaulted, her pride if she didn’t or that great guru of little girls gymnastics, Bela Karolyi, calling her a name.

Boxing’s brutality is out there for all to see. The brutality of the Olympic gym is a family secret, like domestic abuse.

The secret was exposed, all too vividly, by author Joan Ryan in her book “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” a scathing account of the toll gymnastics and figure skating take on pre-pubescent girls. Read it and run the risk of welling up in a different way the next time you see America’s little soldiers going for the gold.

Karolyi, who developed Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton before Strug reached sweetheart status, comes in for singular reproach. He is revealed not as the bearish hugger you see on TV, but a tyrant who doesn’t hesitate to call his girls “fat pigs,” liken them to cockroaches, bully them as stupid. And get away with it.

“He tells you how rotten your kid is, how she won’t do anything. You get lectured and go home and tell your kid how rotten she is,” one mother, Carrol Stack, is quoted as saying.

“He’s a tough coach,” Strug said, diplomatically. “If he wasn’t so successful he wouldn’t get criticism. He is a great coach and proves it over and over again.”

Karolyi is not the only abuser, and verbal abuse is just the start. Girls are pressured to train and compete with injuries that routinely sideline millionaire ballplayers. The demands of training and diet stunt their physical development. And younger, tinier gymnasts can pull off the toughest tricks, so the quest to stay tiny can lead to eating disorders. And worse.

Julissa Gomez was 16 when she broke her neck doing a vault she shouldn’t have been allowed to do; she died three years later. Anorexia ravaged Christy Henrich, who missed making the 1988 Olympic team by .118 of a point, until she weighed less than 50 pounds.

But we don’t see the made-for-TV movies, only the made-for-TV melodrama. You women devour gymnastics. If NBC had its druthers, Carl Lewis would run the short relay with three female gymnasts - Strug limping the anchor, of course.

I am sitting at a Kerri Strug press conference, but I’m thinking about boxing. No air time for the boxers in Atlanta. NBC is being called the “No Boxing Channel” around Alexander Memorial Coliseum. Coach Al Mitchell wonders if the reason is racism.

“We are the last truly amateur sport left in these Games,” said light-heavyweight Antonio Tarver, whose gold-medal hopes were derailed in the semifinals Friday night. “It’s unfair to USA Boxing that we get shut out like that from prime time.”

It’s amazing, really, when you remember how it used to be. But in 1972, Olga Korbut moved in and Howard Cosell moved out.

If Cosell was still around, he’d be tempted to profile the reformed - we hope - criminals on the boxing team, their stories all as compelling as Strug’s but nowhere near as well-scrubbed.

No, you won’t see squeaky clean superagent Leigh Steinberg representing them. But he was at Strug’s press conference Friday, talking about cereal boxes and appearances on “Beverly Hills 90210” and saying “she’s reflective of the best America has to offer.”

And corporate America is already offering, but fielding those offers is now Steinberg’s job.

“I just want to experience the Olympics and savor the moment,” Strug said. “We met the Dream Team yesterday and I’d like to go to other events.”

I didn’t see her at boxing. But I was thinking about her.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: LOCAL WATCH A look at how athletes from Washington and Idaho fared at the Olympics on Friday: Track and field: Chantal Brunner (ex-WSU, New Zealand), 10th in women’s long jump, 21-3-1/2; Allen James (ex-WWU) 24th, 4:01:18 and Herm Nelson (Renton) disqualified, men’s 50-kilometer walk; Eversley Linley (ex-Idaho, St. Vincent and the Grenadines), men’s 4x400 relay, 3:06.52, didn’t qualify for finals; Eric Haynes (ex-Idaho, St. Kitts), men’s 4x100 relay, 40.12, national record, did not advance); Tawanda Chiwira (Idaho, Zimbabwe), men’s 4x400 relay, 3:13.35, did not qualify. Men’s canoe/kayak: John Mooney (Seattle) finished sixth in 1:32.25 in men’s K-2 500-meter semifinals.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review