Hopeful female athletes should no longer move to Magglingen at the age of 14, but only when they are adults: this is intended to avoid injuries and the premature end of careers.
After that there was no turning back: Nadia Comaneci, here in March 1976 at a competition in New York, won Olympic gold that same year at the age of 14.
Jerry Cooke / Getty
There was a time when the world‘s best gymnasts were adults. When women first took part in the Olympic Games in gymnastics in 1952, it was still taken for granted. In the individual all-around competition, Marija Gorokhovskaya from the Soviet Union triumphed at the premiere; she was 30 years and 266 days old. At the four following Summer Games, the winners in that competition were 21, 25, 22 and 26. Nobody thought at the time that children were superior to women.
The youth craze began when rivalries in sports became more intense during the Cold War, initially in the capitalist West. Former gymnast Georgia Cervin proves this in her book “Degrees of Difficulty: How Women’s Gymnastics Rose to Prominence and Fell from Grace”. The communist opponents reacted to the trend – and perfected it more quickly (see graphic). In 1976, Romanian Nadia Comaneci won Olympic gold at just 14 years old. After that there was no turning back.
Role model Mujinga Kambundji: Fast in his late 20s
In the following decades, the premise also became established in Switzerland that gymnasts should aim for their peak in their teens. From the 1970s onwards, it was always said that if you wanted to go far, you had to put everything into sport as early as possible. The protagonists at home and abroad stuck to this credo until recently. They did this even though the Cold War was long over – and even though some experts now actually knew better.
Sports scientist Christoph Schärer wants to prove that there is another way. He is head of research and development at the Swiss Gymnastics Federation (STV) and is responsible, among other things, for gymnastics at the Federal Office of Sport. In 2004 he took part in the Olympic Games in Athens. “Women can still achieve top performance in speed sports even in their late 20s,” says Schärer. «The sprinter Mujinga Kambundji reached the Olympic final over 100 meters at the age of 29. There is no reason why corresponding top performances shouldn’t also be possible in artistic gymnastics.”
The doll was a gift from the Canadian host government: Nadia Comaneci at the 1976 Olympics.
Bettmann / Getty
Schärer advocates consistently straightening out the careers of female athletes in Switzerland. It is important that girls at a young age train intensively in gymnastics clubs. Then they learned the movements most easily. But during puberty, the start of which varies from person to person, fewer jumps and landings with a high risk of injury should be required. Instead, it is important to give the gymnasts time during this growth phase.
“The tendency used to be to trim the child’s body,” says Schärer. «There was no individual control. My perspective is now different: We should build up female athletes in the long term and also make them psychologically ready for competitive sport and for life.”
Schärer is met with approval from the STV leadership. “The system has not yet given the gymnasts any time,” says the head of the Olympic Mission, David Huser. But despite all the hard work, the desired success all too rarely came about. Athletes like Giulia Steingruber and Ariella Kaeslin have sporadically made it to the top of the world. However, Huser does not want this to be seen as proof that the funding system worked. Rather, these were individual exceptions at the time.
Huser has been with STV since 2021. It came after the “Magglingen Protocols” and other media reports made grievances obvious. Taking office later may help him to analyze past failures more ruthlessly.
The STV has now decided under him that gymnasts who are aiming for professional careers should generally not move to Magglingen if they are more than 14 years old. Instead, they should live and train at home until they come of age. “At an age that is crucial for personal development, we have taken the athletes out of school and their usual environment,” says Huser. That was wrong. In the future, we will focus on working in the regional performance centers for longer.
The change is not only met with enthusiasm. Huser reports on “intensive conversations” with parents who feared that their daughter, of all people, would be deprived of her dream of a sporting breakthrough. Last year showed how emotional discussions about athletes’ paths can sometimes be. The non-nomination of gymnast Sophia Chiariello for the Junior World Championships was scandalized by SRF as if the athlete had been robbed of her future.
Huser says that there are also experts who are of the opinion that the gymnasts should not be sent to Magglingen later, but even earlier if they want to be internationally successful. However, he would like to stick to the chosen path and enable the regional performance centers to play a larger role in the development of talent. A key argument in his opinion is the age development at major events. Since 2003 it has been observed that participants in world championships and the Olympic Games are, on average, getting older and older (see graphic). International careers are also taking longer and longer.
The sports scientist Schärer hopes that completely different career paths will be possible in Switzerland in the future. The aim must be not only to reduce the number of injuries in the youth sector, but also to avoid premature termination of careers as often as possible. “The number of girls who did gymnastics before puberty has always been high in Switzerland,” he says. “But after that only a few remained. The high drop-out rate speaks for itself.”
How well the reform succeeds will depend heavily on the regional performance centers, which will now look after the gymnasts for much longer. The need for well-trained trainers is increasing at the Zurich Gymnastics Association, for example. Despite the associated challenges, Marc-Oliver Völz, head of top sports at the Zurich Gymnastics Association (ZTV) since November, emphasizes that he believes the measure is the right one.
“From a biomechanical perspective and from a career path perspective, there is no reason not to leave the athletes in their usual environment a little longer,” says Völz. It’s also about social aspects. “Until now, the changes often happened far too early. We hope to avoid early burnout more often. Ultimately, the goal must be for gymnasts’ careers to last longer.” The cooperation between STV and ZTV will be even more intensive in the future.
Opposite development in skateboarding and breakdancing
In principle, the realization that top performance is not only conceivable in teenagers could also trigger radical changes in other sports, for example in figure skating. “Top-class sport should be practiced by adults,” says sports scientist Schärer, “by mature and self-determined people.”
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has the opportunity to push development, but is not acting consistently. On the one hand, the IOK has been recommending that individual sports associations introduce age limits since 2022. On the other hand, skateboarding, a discipline in which the leading protagonists are particularly young, often between 12 and 14, recently became an Olympic discipline. It is hardly different in breakdancing, which will be included in the program of the Summer Games in Paris in 2024.
Huser would welcome it if the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) took a pioneering role with a binding minimum age in the elite sector. Then the youth madness would actually be history. However, in conversations with fellow officials, he notices a great deal of reluctance: people are waiting for the IOK to act. For the time being, the trend of giving female athletes more time is likely to remain voluntary at the international level.
An article from “NZZ am Sonntag”