Posts by dyan campbell
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Dyan, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know the age of competition in gymnastics has been raised to 16 by the IOC. Hence the complaints by the American team that the Chinese appear 'underage'.
I'm not sure - I haven't heard that but it would make sense from a social point of view, if not an athletic one. I'm about the same age as Nadia Comaneci (over 50) and n our era we were taught to believe once you started to develop your career was over - at 16 you were pretty much finished. I quit at 15, but taught gymnastics (off and on) well into my 30s and would even do the odd routine when no one was looking. Fortunately my husband is a physiotherapist...
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And given how much training and control of diet has to occur from a very early age in order to reach the Olympic level, there's the question of how much choice they have in the whole thing. It's possible to think that Olympic female gymnasts are amazing and skilled athletes and still be "freaked out" - or, more correctly, disturbed - by what happens to get them to that point.
You're so right! At the Olympic level what they do is insane - I saw Nadia Comaneci interviewed as an adult and she recounted some of the horrors - they were chosen very young (3 or 4) on the basis of their ability to ignore physical pain on the playground, and once they were picked they were given steriod injections (and told they were vitamins). Steroids given in childhood definitely stunt growth, as does excessive training. Coffee and tea don't help either. I really wish I hadn't drunk either in childhood, I'd probably have been 2" taller.
But I've seen people train excessively and still grow to be giants - one girl in my ballet class who was destined to be a star, she had so much promise, grew to a whopping 5'11" despite an insane amount of training. Her towering height spelled the end of any dancing career.
I may have been about 4'10" and 35kg at 13 when I was a competitive gymnast (provincial Canada, not the Olympics) but I did grow to a normal size ( 5'6") and gymnastics was not my only activity - I did track and field (sprinting) quite a bit of ballet and lived to skateboard and ski and ride cross-country BMX (they were called Mustang or Panther bikes in those days, but same idea). I have discovered snowboarding in middle age, and like the rest of my family, have never outgrown my desire to go outside and play. No one in my family ever weighed much more than a cat but we all eat a lot.
Having said that, I agree that gymnastics is an insane sport, not just in terms of stunting growth but also how bad the injuries can be. It's quite a bit more dangerous than it looks, as I know only too well.
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The Chinese gymnasts seem atypical, though: most of the women are pocket rockets: five-footers with huge shoulders and narrow waists. That looks even more unusual.
That's a pretty typical gymnast's body - big shoulders, tiny waist, and the girls who do the floor routine have very solid thighs too - the bar and beam girls can be less powerful through the legs. Though I would doubt any of the Chinese team break the 5 foot mark - most of them are far from full grown and I would guess are around 4'10".
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the gymnasts SHOULD be naked
The point Dyan makes above is a very good reason why they shouldn't!
Which point? That the girls are pubescent, that the men are tiny or that they all eat a lot?
From the point of view of the athletes, the male gymnasts anyway, that pommel horse is a reason to keep their tights on.
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Oh come on Mark, you can also have tiny little pre-adolescent stick-figures with faked birth certificates. Geez, fussy.
Gymnasts are indeed tiny and very young. Pound for pound, pubescent girls are the strongest of our species, in terms of strength to weight ratio.
They may freak you out, but believe me there is a real pleasure in being that strong and that agile, even if it does diminish as soon as you develop and once that happens your chance at that sport is over. There's a reason Nadia Comaneci was 13 when she won gold.
I have to say, from an attracted-to-men perspective the men's gymnastics (esp. the all-round competition) does provide some fine viewing.
Except they're tiny . It's a sport where being big is a huge disadvantage. For male beauty giive me a sprinter, circa 1936. Jesse Owens seemed a nice size and shape, or perhaps Michaelangelo's David, though not in marble.
I'm not surprised, dear," says Professor Janice Thompson, head of Bristol University's department of exercise, nutrition and health sciences, when, belching quietly, I return to my desk. "There's no way you should be able to eat what Michael Phelps eats. This is not even a normal athlete. I would not recommend this kind of diet for even a fit and serious competitor in, say, a 10km road race. This man is in a very, very different place to the rest of us. He's 6ft 4in and 192lb of pure joy. From a female perspective, obviously. Though I probably shouldn't say that."
Being strong and agile does feel nice, but the other great pleasure about being an athlete - no matter how much you eat you never put on weight - the greater ratio of muscle to fat, the higher number of calories burned at a resting rate. Just sitting still an athlete can burn more calories than an unfit person engaged in light activity.
I remember seeing an interview with Sarah Ulmer and Hamish Carter and they were talking about the sheer freakish volume of food they consumed in the course of a day, their friends who were not athletic could not understand how they could eat that much. When I was a gymnast I wouldn't eat much before a competition (porridge and a couple pieces of fruit is plenty) but after either competition or a few hours of practice I could certainly demolish eggs benedict, hash browns, bacon, buttermilk waffles with fried bananas, strawberries and yoghurt and several orange juices and coffees. That's at 13 and about 35 kg.
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What's scarier --Goth Kate dry humping the cello, or Kate the fantasy art fetish made flesh?
Kate Bush may be the worst dancer in the history of dancing, but having said that, I love that song of hers Hounds of Love .
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Posted at 9:50PM on 14 Aug 08. Permalink.
. . . the glorious Turgenev, whose spare, unsentimental descriptions of Russia's serfs in A Sportsman's Notebook moved Peter the Great to emancipate the serfs. That's some pretty effective fiction.
Eh????? Peter the Great had been dead for over 90 years when Turgenev was born. Surely you're thinking of Alexander II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861). Right about Turgenev's influence, wrong Tsar.
Whoops, thank you Joe, you're right, I have the wrong Tsar, it was Alexander II and it was Turgenev's uncle who knew Peter the Great (he was the court jester apparently).
Peter the Great owned Pushkin's grandfather (great grandfather?) the Ethiopian prince about whom Pushkin wrote the story Peter the Great's Negro.
Craig, I heartily agree, Checkhov could be very funny, I liked his description in A Boring Story of a man surveying his daughter's fiance (who was eating lobster soup, and dressed in a yellow checked suit) who "thought he had more in common with a Zulu tribesman". Or his letter to his siblings (written as a 26 year old doctor in a tiny village overrun by several thousand old women on a religious pilgrimmage) "If I'd known there were this many old women in the world I'd have shot myself a long time ago..."
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Anyone else choked on "Little [bloody] Dorrit" at school?
Not I. But I fully see Oscar Wilde's point when he said that "one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing".
Yes, I see what Wilde was getting at, I don't like Dicken's style much either - very different style from the glorious Turgenev, whose spare, unsentimental descriptions of Russia's serfs in A Sportsman's Notebook moved Peter the Great to emancipate the serfs. That's some pretty effective fiction.
Checkhov maintained that a writer could achieve much greater effect by writing as coldly and as objectively as possible about the most heart rending things. By understating the descriptions, he maintained, your reader would be far more moved by the descriptions of misery.
This doesn't detract from the reality of Dickens's descriptions - his work houses and factories were real and he knew about them first hand. And as someone pointed out, his descriptions of poverty were cleaned up to spare sensitive readers the uglier aspects of poverty.
Victor Hugo did not shy away from such descriptions and there is a nauseating passage in Les Miserables (__The Poor__) where beautiful Fantine has all her front teeth pulled (to sell - this is where false teeth came from in those days ) to pay for food for her child. Of course this leaves her less beautiful, and her life as a prostitute takes a turn for the even more horrible and degrading.
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Good Goddess, Danielle. Dickens was a great novelist (though one who, in my view, was highly uneven and somewhat over-rated), but you might as well hold up Gone With The Wind as a historically and sociologically reliable document of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, as opposed to a vastly entertaining piece of melodramatic fiction.
Dickens may have written fiction, but was writing from personal experience - his family had been middle class but lost their money and the adults went to debtor's prison and Dickens at about 9 or 10. He was taken out of his boarding school and sent to work 12 hour days in a bottle factory. The descriptions of the terrible suffering that comes with poverty were from his own memory and the concept of the genteel little boy who falls of desperate times was autobiographical.
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I had a win last week - after years of Mrs Llew insisting on buying Extra Light olive oil, and refusing to take my word that she should be buying extra virgin, the DomPost informed her that the "light" has nothing to do with fat content, and all to do with colour & taste. Yay!
Yes, that's true - the purpose of the light (colourless) stuff is for frying etc (higher smoking temp) or can be used in baking that requires oil (safflower is better) as it has no flavour. The extra virgin green should be used for salad dressings, and is the oil you add when making stuff like hummous or mayonnaise. You can heat the extra virgin, it's just not good for frying.
Re: coffee in Vancouver in particular in North America in general: yes, it's sadly true that coffee is largely undrinkable in Vancouver. In the 70s and 80s there were great coffee places - one called The Classical Joint that had been popular since the 50s and was still filled with goateed beatniks in berets, spouting poetry and playing chess - and older places like Max's Deli that have been going since the 30s or 40s. The Mozart Cafe (before Robson Street became Vancouver's Rodeo Drive) served excellent Austrian coffee and truly fabulous food, and their famous Cafe Vienna - strong coffee/hot chocolate hybrid topped with whipped cream and shaved chocolate.
Almost all of Vancouver's great coffee places were driven out of business by Starbucks, so weirdly dominant there, there is literally one on every corner in some neighbourhoods. They sold coffee cheaper and traded longer hours, a combo that seemed to destroy any other coffee place's business. When I go home I'm horrified to find coffee culture is extinct in my hometown - there are a few secret places trading, almost like an underground coffee scene, but good coffee is strangely extinct. Remember this is a place that valued coffee so much that high schools (mine anyway) had a coffee room with espresso machine and big sofas and armchairs for us to socialise, drink coffee and play the jukebox while we studied.
Coffee all across North America used to be very good, strong filter coffee. The rule all across North America - Canada, USA & Mexico - is the first cup you buy, all refills are free. It's the Bottomless Cup of Coffee. Until the late 1970s when coffee was cheap the coffee was served strong - the price shot up (partly due to US military incursions in South America, if I remember correctly) and suddenly filter coffee became very weak and vile.
Remember it was American servicemen who brought coffee culture to NZ in the first place - though it didn't seem to catch on much. When I first came here in the late 1980s there was little available but instant and the "real" coffee made in restaurants was often kept on a rolling boil and formed not so much a drink as a grey colloidal system of burnt coffee particles. And food was really, really vile in cafes - there was scone-base "pizza" - tinned spagetti with white sugar sprinkled over. There was one kind of cheese for all time - recipes read "cheese" as they knew there was only one kind in the whole country. A person could go mad shopping for then exotic ingredients like fresh herbs or any other cheese besides "cheese". Or olive oil or eggplant or artichokes. You couldn't buy yoghurt, let alone full fat unsweetened Greek yoghurt. You couldn't even buy fresh ginger. Restaurants served fuit that came out of tins. It was sad.
Mind you, in defence of traditional English cooking, my mother in law made the most amazing pot roast with a fresh (from her garden) thyme stuffing, she knew all the tricks about roasting potatoes (par boil, dredge with flour and salt while still hot, let dry completely, plunge into red hot oil and roast quickly) she could make the best gravy on earth - I don't usually like gravy, but one needed it to go with her astonishing yorkshire puddings - and she was famous, very famous for her baking. She made fried scones which were fantastic, and very good with homemade jam (my contribution) and cream. She used to make more than a dozen (__literally__) desserts for Christmas dinner if you included all the gingerbread, shortbread etc.
But I must say I wouldn't want to eat that kind of food every day, and I am soooo lucky I didn't grow up eating that stuff. My NZer husband found it strange that I should have grown up eating fresh pineapple, coconut, mangoes and chewing fresh sugar cane in the Pacific Northwest, while he ate weird grey cubed fruit out of a tin down here in the South Pacific.