How Tall Are Olympic Gymnasts?

What’s the height of Olympic gymnasts? The 2008 Olympics routinely gave out heights of volleyball players and divers, and I can confidently assume that heights of other athletes such as basketball players, high jumpers and weight lifters were also given. I watched just about all the gymnastics and nobody’s height was given. Maybe I missed a few mentions, but you know as well as I that giving out the heights of gymnasts is apparently a huge taboo.

If you’re wondering why I need to know heights, then ask yourself instead, why heights of divers are often given as the diver walks to the edge of the board. Heights of volleyball players were often announced by the commentators. I also bet that heights of wrestlers were revealed. So why not the gymnasts, especially since 4-9 Shawn Johnson towered over a few? One male gymnast merely reached over his head and was able to grab the high bar, while most of the others had to be hoisted up by a man.

I know why heights are no longer given for gymnasts. Remember when BOTH heights and weights were given for every gymnast? What happened? Someone got the nutty idea — and I mean NUTTY — that giving out heights and weights of gymnasts would increase risk of developing body image disorders and eating disorders in adolescent and teen girls watching the competition! The idea was that if a vulnerable girl was watching a little pixie of a gymnast on TV, and the height and weight turned up on the screen: 5-1 and 97 pounds, the girl would then strive to be just like her favorite gymnast and starve herself down to 97 pounds.

If you think my theory is full of holes, then I welcome other theories. At about the time that the heights and weights of gymnasts were no longer flashed on the TV screen, the media began gulping up stories about anorexia and body image disorders. Suddenly, there was this explosion of information about eating disorders, girls starving themselves to death, throwing up food, exercising from sun-up to sun-down, in an attempt to look like their role models: fashion models in teen magazines or thin women on TV.

At around this same time (1995), a book came out, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” about how, supposedly, U.S. gymnastics coaches (and figure skating coaches) pressured girls to lose unrealistic amounts of weight, and how the athletes would skip meals to stay lean. There were allegations that Bela Karolyi, at the time he was training Mary Lou Retton for her Olympics, was badgering girls to be thin, even though his star pupil was compact.

And then suddenly…the heights and weights were missing. What else could I conclude other than someone out there actually believed that showing heights and weights of gymnasts would encourage anorexia! And the heights and weights have been missing since, and the media attention to eating disorders has never diminished. Coincidence?

I say let’s bring the heights and weights back. After all, it’s the Olympics, and we’d all like to know interesting details about athletes. Doggone it, don’t you think it’d be fascinating to know that many hurdlers for the U.S. women’s track team are short? Some of the best hurdlers are quite short, and I learned this from a Web site. This is intriguing information, because you can’t tell if a hurdler is only 5-2 just by viewing her in the starting lineup. Many 100 and 200 meter specialists are tall, and very few (at the Olympic level), if any, are 5-2. So apparently, long legs are a disadvantage in hurdling. Who’d ever think?

I then got to speculating that short legs could run full-speed between hurdles without messing up the rhythm (step-step-step JUMP), but long legs would not be able to stride full speed without mangling the rhythm between each hurdle (step-step-stutter-step JUMP). So this is what I mean when I say it’s fascinating to know heights.

One of the Chinese female gymnasts was 4-5 and 68 pounds. A relative of mine looked up the gymnast’s name on the Internet to get this information. Viewers can always guess weight, once they know the height, and weight really isn’t a big deal when it comes to gymnasts, but HEIGHT IS.

One has to wonder if that 4-5 gymnast was younger than the minimum age requirement.

Heights were mentioned for the male shot-putters. I guess if a 13-year-old girl learns that a male shot-putter stands 6-8, she won’t develop an eating disorder.