Degrees of Difficulty: How Women's Gymnastics Rose to Prominence and Fell from Grace

Abstract

Since the late twentieth century, gymnastics has been “must-see” television during the summer Olympics, alongside swimming and track and field. All three sports garner huge ratings and, not coincidentally, feature American excellence. This is particularly true for gymnastics; Sunisa Lee's performance in the 2020 Tokyo games made her the fifth American woman in a row to win gold in the individual all-around. However, as Georgia Cervin reminds readers in Degrees of Difficulty: How Women's Gymnastics Rose to Prominence and Fell from Grace, the popularity of gymnastics and American dominance are not only of recent origin but came at great cost to both the athletes and the sport.Gymnastics gained prominence during the Cold War, a time when gymnasts’ victories and personalities served as potent weapons in the global fight for symbolic and sporting supremacy. Eastern bloc countries dominated the Olympic podium early on, ultimately changing the sport forever with their innovative routines. Although the popular conception is that Olga Korbut and Nadia Comăneci revolutionized gymnastics with their acrobatic tricks and youthful ages, Cervin argues that Americans deserve credit for the latter development, as they were the first to add gymnasts barely into their teens to their national teams. The move to recruit younger gymnasts—one that other countries soon emulated—contributed to a major power imbalance between older male coaches and their younger, female charges, as well as to an environment of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.While there have been several books and documentaries detailing that abuse in the wake of the Larry Nassar scandal, Degrees of Difficulty is the first to offer an international history of the sport that explains how gymnastics created and sustained an environment in which such abuse could take place. In tapping her own experiences as an international gymnast, marshaling numerous secondary sources, and researching the archives of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG), Cervin offers a comprehensive account of the origins of women's artistic gymnastics and its evolution from an exhibition sport that debuted at the often overlooked Athens Olympics in 1906 to a marquee event in 2021.Cervin is at her best detailing the negotiations between the IOC and FIG, a collaboration that produced a sport that was traditionally feminine, entertaining, and, ultimately, fair. A new scoring system, which abandoned the “perfect 10” model made famous by Comăneci in 1976, now reflects a routine's degree of difficulty as well as its actual execution, produces greater transparency among judges, and grants gymnasts unprecedented opportunities to set world records. Even as Cervin comments on the collaborative process between the IOC and FIG that produced modern gymnastics as we know it, the resulting product was a sport that was quintessentially feminine. Cervin maintains that women's gymnastics were engineered to esteem elegance and grace—an intentional contrast with men's gymnastics—and thus was acceptable for females. However, as the author points out, it reinforced a very narrow definition of femininity—one that prized diminutive, elegant, and white participants—that blunted the sport's feminist intent.Less convincing is Cervin's claim that women's artistic gymnastics “opened the door for women's participation in other sports” (212). Her assertion of a link between the acceptance of women's gymnastics and their increased athletic participation lacks a clear cause and effect; certainly, the agency and appreciation women gained through gymnastics mattered, but Cervin fails to provide clear evidence that shows, for example, how the sport specifically influenced and encouraged the IOC to include more sports or events for women on its Olympic docket. Moreover, there were other sports in which women competed—golf, tennis, swimming, figure skating—that were also traditionally feminine, predated the emergence of women's gymnastics, and certainly contributed to the acceptability of female participation in sport, albeit without the female governance that gymnastics enjoyed early on.Nevertheless, Degrees of Difficulty is an important read and makes the case for necessary changes to a sport that millions love to watch but whose institutional history few understand. Those include increasing the minimum age of gymnasts, engendering a more collaborative relationship between athletes and coaches, and urging FIG to take a more activist role in banning coaches, administrators, and even nations from international competition for ethics violations. These reforms are necessary, particularly if, according to Georgia Cervin, the sport wants to fully embrace its feminist origins. In so doing it can set an important example for female gymnasts and, indeed, for all athletes, regardless of their sport or gender.