Did Dominique have an eating disorder?
Of course not. She was a triple Olympian.
In this interview she speaks about growing up petite and muscular. The psychological challenges of being built like an Olympic gymnast in a world where magazine models are 5′ 10″ tall.
Dominique, 31, was the first African-American woman to win an individual medal in gymnastics, having won bronze in the floor exercise at the ’96 Games, the second of her third Olympics. She was recently named – along with her teammates on the “Magnificent Seven†from 1996 – to the United States Olympic Committee’s Hall of Fame and will be inducted in June.
BlogHer audiocast interview
8 comments ↓
I do not understand how being a triple olympian makes you “not having a eating disorder”. Many olympians had and have eating disorders. There is even a name for it: “Anorexia athletica”. Gymnasts, dancers, track athletes, ski jumpers… When being lightweight means you are able to perform better athletes tend to do everything – EVERYTHING – to get there. No matter what.
In order to train and compete for a minimum of 9yrs, 3 Olympics, there is no way a gymnast can have a serious eating disorder.
That’s super high intensity work-out, 4hrs / day. You could not be competitive with an unhealthy eating disorder.
The high level gymnasts who develop problems tend to have it happen after they retire.
I must have zoned out during that part because I missed it. I did hear where she said that as a young woman she realized that being petite and muscular was what made her good at gymnastics but she also wanted to fit in at school. Maybe she meant that she knew even though she might want to look a certain way, that just wasn’t going to happen in a healthy way for her if she wanted to continue being successful at gymnastics.
I do not know about gymnasts, but I do know about elite track athletes (having been one myself and now coaching track at etlite level), and there *are* serious eating disorders. The girls still train two times a day (that is around 4-5 hours a day), more when being at camps, and they manage to keep going. Not everybody has this problem but it is very very common. Coaches tend to ignore it.
Whatever the truth is, Dawes ALWAYS looked very healthy to me. There were many girls that stopped looking healthy or started looking “tired” in their careers and you foudn out later they were bulemic or otherwise. I mean I know you can still hide it, and it still happens, but Dawes? She seems too strong-willed to fall into that. I don’t know!
I would be very careful about eating disorders. They are very hard to detect. Who would have thought that Vanessa Alter suffered from one most of her gymnastics career?
I also suffered from an eating disorder for a while during my gymnastic career. No one questioned me and as far as I am aware no one knew. People with eating disorders are very secretive… I would go to the library during lunch hour to do homework so my friends wouldn’t see me not eating. Then I would get home from school and get ready for gym before my mom came home from work, so when she asked if I ate I could simply say yes (my dad would make dinner before he left for work and leave it for us). This was when I was training 16 hours per week in high level competitive gymnastics and 10 hours per week in competitive swimming.
I’m not saying Dawes definately had an eating disorder, I’m just saying that they are far more difficult to detect than what people make them out to be.
Alright, I’m convinced.
I was thinking a condition with decreasing weight, for example. Gymnastics is just so intensive that it would go unnoticed.
But certainly there must be athletes that can “train” to some level while having disordered eating. Dawes is not one of those. But there must be some.
a fellow coach I used to work with who was elite and an olympic team reserve told us the story of the coaches giving them vitamins, diet pills, and water during the trials and big meets and much of their time at camps and training.
She also knows a few big names out of the 90′s on a personal level from the US who she competed for.
I’m not sure if she had to continue to do this at College ( another big school name in the Bay area ).
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