Jennifer Sey was 1986 US All-Around Champion. She competed World Championships but retired before the 1988 Olympic trials.
“The essence of lying is in deception, not in words. A lie may be told by silence, by equivocation, by the accent on a syllable, by a glance of the eye attaching a peculiar significance to a sentence. All these kinds of lies are worse and baser by many degrees than a lie plainly worded. No form of blinded conscience is so far sunk as that which comforts itself for having deceived because the deception was by gesture or silence, instead of utterance.”
– John Ruskin
Right now the general public is reading articles like this:
A new book called Chalked Up by ex-gymnast Jennifer Sey appears to confirm what many of us have long suspected: gymnastics is a weird and creepy sport. Not the tumbling and flipping part; that’s cool enough. But the entire gymnastics complex that takes little girls and hammers them into world class athletes with eating disorders is a little sickening. And all those middle-aged men coaching—what are they doing there? I choose to sweepingly judge the lot of them as shady characters. …
Gymnast Author Confirms Gymnastics Is Full Of Sickos – Gawker
Jennifer linked to this article from her blog, happy to get the media coverage.
But is gymnastics “weird and creepy”? – NO
Are all middle-age men coaching gymnasts “shady characters”? – NO
Much misinformation like this has been generated around the recent release of Jennifer’s book. I believe the author is a willing participant in this game of generating controversy during a book launch.
I called Jennifer Sey a liar after I read this interview:
Sey spoke with Salon by phone from her home in San Francisco. …
Salon: Is it possible that you were just the victim of rogue coaches? I know the Parkettes Training Center has a particularly bad reputation — it was even the subject of an unflattering CNN documentary in 2003.
Sey: [This behavior] is endemic to the sport. …
“Why do these men want to coach little girls?” – Salon
Jennifer did not write the Salon article. But she knows their readers have now had confirmed that “anorexia and sexual and mental abuse … are rampant in elite women’s gymnastics”.
Is that true? – NO
I challenge Jennifer to walk into any elite program and make those charges face-to-face to a coach. She’d be laughed out of the gym.
Those things have happened, but rarely. They are not “endemic”.
Jennifer Sey is a liar by any definition of the word. Even if every word in her book is true as she remembers it. (And that’s been contested by some of her teammates from the time.)
If you disagree with me, buy her book. If not, encourage everyone you know to boycott Chalked Up. You can read it, but don’t purchase even one more copy.
If Jennifer Sey wanted to exorcise demons from over 20-years-ago as a memoir, she could have done it on her blog. That she chose to release an inflammatory book in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics smacks of opportunism.
Related posts:
Jennifer Sey defends her book Chalked Up
sensationalist media coverage of gymnastics
I’ve been in contact with Jennifer and would gladly post a rebuttal to my charges.
Gymnastics Coaching.com 