In what feels like several political decades ago, the former Ambassador to the UN and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley was running for president. On CNN, anchor Don Lemon pushed the button to finally, mercifully detonate his career when he opined thusly:
"[Nikki Haley] isn’t in her prime…[a woman] is considered to be in her prime in her 20s, 30s and 40s”
Nikki Haley, despite a moral compass that somehow got substituted with a weathervane, is not past her prime. She is in fact 51 years old.
I thought of Nikki as I was watching Sarah Sjoestrom, one of the greatest athletes swimming has ever seen, “upset” the field in the 100 free. Rowdy Gaines was incredulous. No one, apparently, thought that Sjoestrom (I will be using the oe instead of typing the umlauted o as it would be represented in the original Swedish) would win. How could she? She’s an ancient fossil of (checks notes) 30 years old!
For women’s swimming she’s way past her prime.
COpy/pAste
Let’s do, as we usually do in this blog, a history lesson. Now it’s true that women’s swimming has been at the Olympics since the relatively early days. That distinguished it from other sports that previously were considered to be too strenuous for dainty female bodies to compete in. To be sure, swimming still had anachronisms like no 1500m until Tokyo 2021, women have nominally been on an even competitive plane.
However, crucially, prior to Title IX, women’s Olympic swimming was almost universally truly girls Olympic swimming. Debbie Meyer, the Katie Ledecky of her day, was 16 when she competed in her one and only Olympics in 1968. By 1972, Shane Gould was the top female swimmer at the Olympics. She was 16 years old. Had the US competed at the 1980 games, our top swimmer would have most likely been 17 year old Tracy Caulkins.
Only after Title IX had been established did we start to see legal adult women compete in swimming at the Olympics in any significant number. Still, many top athletes appeared to peak competitively in their teenage years rather than what you might ordinarily assume is the prime of a woman’s life.
Sports culture writ large is more or less a copy/paste job from men’s bodies to women’s bodies. If you think I’m not being inclusive of people who don’t fit the gender binary, I’ll offer that swimming has essentially slammed that door shut after Lia Thomas. I’ll write about that at another time. Sports, and swimming is one of the most reactionary spaces we have.
In sports parlance, there are men, and then there are women. Men are the mold, and everything else is an imperfect version of a man. In swimming, more specifically, women actually have a slightly more nuanced reputation. Women are often lauded by coaches because of their perceived capacity to train harder and longer. In a sport where pain tolerance is the closest thing there is to a virtue, women get an approving nod.
While one might assume then that women are actually the favored sex in the sport, this focus belies what I think is a giant flaw in how we (the Royal Academy of Swim Coaches*) train women. The expectations for practice are generally higher. There is absolutely no consideration given, from a planning perspective, to menstruation. Coaches vary from either downright hostile to the inconvenience of it, to completely ignorant of the dynamic shift it makes in hormone levels.
Many of the women I trained with pushed their bodies to the extent that they no longer menstruated. In the recent lawsuit filed against Lars Jorgensen, the disgraced former coach of University of Kentucky, Jorgensen was cited as being downright antagonistic towards his athletes menstruating.
I’m not a scientist, just an ordinary person married to a woman who’s taken the basic level of interest. A women’s menstrual cycle can cause fluctuations in all of the major hormones. I’m also just an ordinary person that knows that tinkering with hormone levels is grounds for an extremely punitive ban in the world of sport. People take performance enhancing drugs to optimize their hormonal levels for performance.
Men, more or less, have stable hormone level. So any day, from that perspective, is as good as the next for training. Every swim coach I have ever heard of plans training on any given day as if everyone is on an even playing field.
I suspect they’d plan differently if you told them that doping was legal and condoned, and that in any given month some of their athletes would be on PEDs for a week, “average” for another couple weeks, and then on performance DEHANCERS for another week. You would, common sense dictating, try to make hay for the PED week, and back off for the dehanced week.
I’m not practically suggesting that anyone start planning this way tomorrow, so please coaches don’t start asking all your athletes to share their cycle with you. I point this out because it’s just one example of how sports has been copy/pasted from men to women. In many other ways, big and small, I think what this adds up to is that broadly, we do a poorer job coaching women in swimming than we do men.
In Their “Prime”
Does that mean we can’t do a better job coaching men? Hell no. Just that I think there is more room for improvement broadly in how sophisticated we are at coaching women.
Back to Sjoestrom. It’s not that there have been no women successfully competing at this level into their 30s. In fact, it happens at every Olympics. It’s just that, at any given time there are far more men competing successfully into college and beyond.
Early in my career, I often heard this attributed to boy’s later puberty. That men would continue to fill out and get more muscular and stronger into their 20s and this, of course was advantageous. This argument was always included with the assumption that essentially puberty was not helpful to girls. That women were not conferred an advantage.
I find myself disagreeing. I had this thought as I was watching gymnastics at the Olympics. Just look at a picture of the US gold medal team from Paris, and then look at the gold medal team of my youth, the 1996 team.
The 1996 team look like little girls in comparison. Now, who is competing gymnastics at a higher level? Did something change genetically in 28 years where all of a sudden more adult looking woman are now better at gymnastics? I think not.
I think that in the wake of an abuse scandal so putrid, so horrifying and so well publicized, the sport of gymnastics was faced with a crisis of adaptation or death. So they adapted. Their coaching culture gravitated away from intimidating pre-pubescent girls into performing until their bodies literally broke. It gravitated towards finding ways to actually convince WOMEN to stay in the sport and continue to progress and develop. Is it still probably really dysfunctional? Probably. From my eyes they have made improvements in coaching.
Swimming will probably take a slower path, barring a similar existential crisis. Our abuse crisis didn’t reach the height of infamy that Larry Nassar garnered. It was somewhat more muted, more local. We handled it “in house”. The state of coaching women in swimming has never fully reached a breaking point, so we’re never fully committed to reforming it.
In life, you can learn things the hard way. Right now, hundreds of thousands of women and girls are learning that swimming wasn’t built for them. Coaches of post-pubescent girls and women are frustrated watching erstwhile dedicated, hard working athletes stop or even regress in terms of development. We don’t have to wait for a crisis to coach better, we can just be honest about where we are and work from there.
*This is not a real thing, I’m just being a smartass