Resources

Other Sources of Help or Information

Gymnasts for Change (G4C)

https://www.gymnastsforchange.com

Books

Little Girls in Pretty Boxes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Girls_in_Pretty_Boxes

Films

Athlete A

https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81034185

Little Girls in Pretty Boxes

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119551

A made for television adaptation of the book by Joan Ryan

There’s more than one edition apparently and we found this comment by ‘LeisurelyLoner’ on Reddit insightful:

I had an edition that was revised in 1999 or 2000 (it was released shortly before the Sydney Olympics). The revision was…odd. The original chapters were all the same, and there was an epilogue or something that was supposed to provide an update. The update was very optimistic and seemed to make a case for significant improvements being made in the sport since the original. It praised the 1996 US Olympic team for being mostly over the age of 18 (“women, albeit very small and light women”) and defended Kerri Strug’s climactic vault, saying she only did what any Olympic athlete would have done if they believed their score was needed to clinch a historic gold medal. (In all fairness, that’s likely true, but…what about the fact that her score actually wasn’t needed, and Strug was not told this and it didn’t factor into the decision in any way?)

In particular, I remember the author originally criticized the decision to house the gymnasts separately from the other athletes at the 1992 Olympics because they were “sacrificing the camaraderie of the Olympic village.” Then in the update she seemed to praise the same decision at the 1996 Olympics, where the gymnasts were housed “well beyond the distractions of the Olympic village” or something like that. I was like, wut?

From what we now know, yeah, the issues she was describing weren’t anywhere near over. And from the author’s later interviews, she hasn’t shown this kind of forced optimism since, so I don’t know what that weird updated version was all about.