by Sandra Zarembski

Created on: September 01, 2008

I love Olympic gymnastics as much as I love Olympic figure skating. I watch both sports intently exactly one week every four years. Otherwise there's just too much obscure nonsense for me to cope with, especially in figure skating. Pretty rough stuff for me to say, because I used to be an Adult-level figure skater.

One of the many similarities between the two sports is ever-present controversy. In figure skating, you can't have a competition without it. I've even seen bruh-ha-ha's in local ISIA events, for crying out loud - these are the "open" events where anyone who can stand in skates is welcome and there's nothing more to win than a cheap trophy made of mystery metal. The 2002 double-gold incident in the Olympic pairs event was nothing new to me. You step on an ordinary skating rink during a freestyle (figure skating practice session) any day of the week and there's always something like that going on, albeit usually well beneath the surface.

I suspect most sports have their silly angles like that because the thing is, sports are silly.

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But there are less-silly issues at play here. For instance, a similarity particular to the women's division of both gymnastics and figure skating is the persistent wishful thinking that a female can only be an athlete before she visibly becomes a woman.

During the 1990's in figure skating, it was increasingly believed that any girl over the typical age of puberty was probably too old to skate in the Olympics because her breasts and hips would hamper her rotation in those all-important triple jumps. The moment that questionable theory took hold, the mad rush was on to promote younger and younger girls to the Senior and then hopefully the international elite ranks, trying to beat the clock on puberty putting an end to the their triple hopping skills.

Around the same time a competing theory stating that the real type of athlete needed was an older girl with huge muscular thighs, quietly disappeared. It hasn't been heard of since, probably because delicate skating dresses can look rather silly draped over bulging muscles. One famous skater (who was also a great jumper) actually did have thunder thighs and took to wearing longer skirts; finally she became so beloved that seemingly just for her, the sport dropped its mandate that female skaters wear skirts.

However, skirts on females remain the norm in singles and pair skating and the sport's ruling body continues, to this day, to try to extract multiple triple and even quad jumps

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