Élite Gymnasts Are Aging Up

It used to be assumed that a gymnast’s peak came around sixteen years of age. So why will the Olympic team be stocked with women in their twenties?
A photo of Jordan Chiles performing a beam routine in 2024.
Jordan Chiles performs a beam routine.Photograph by Aric Becker / Getty

When Jordyn Wieber was four years old, her parents put her into a gymnastics class. Within a few years, the coaches there noticed her potential. She started competing at eight and “turned élite”—the highest level, and the ranks from which the members of the national and Olympic teams are chosen—by eleven.

For many young gymnasts, turning élite often means getting homeschooled instead of going to school in person, or even moving to train at one of a handful of prestigious gyms known for producing members of the national team. Wieber attended her local high school but took most of her classes online, when she was not at her twice-a-day practices. At sixteen, in 2011, she won the all-around title at the world championships. Then the following year she went into the London Olympics as the favorite. Though she helped the U.S. bring in a team gold medal, she had stumbled during qualifications and failed to make the all-around final. Aside from touring with the victorious team, that was it. Wieber briefly resumed training, but she never competed again. It was not entirely by choice: she would have loved to continue her career in college, she said, where the pressure and level of gymnastics are lower than at the élite level, but she had forfeited the opportunity before the Olympics by going professional, to take advantage of that brief window for lucrative endorsements. When she went to U.C.L.A., she served as the team manager, and she announced her retirement from competition, in 2015. Her decision to stop was hardly unusual, and not just because of the immense sacrifices that the sport required. It was generally agreed that a female competitor in the sport would peak somewhere around sixteen years old. The belief was that “it gets a lot harder” beyond the mid-teens, she told me.

During the early era of Olympic gymnastics, many of the top athletes were in their twenties, but, in the decades after the Second World War, the ages dropped. Teen-age stars became the norm. Olga Korbut made a spectacular Olympic début in 1972 with her high-flying performances at seventeen. The Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci won the 1976 Olympics at fourteen. Mary Lou Retton was sixteen, still a girl, when she triumphed in ​the 1984 Games. In 1992, all of the all-around Olympic medallists were fifteen years old. They were tiny, hipless and breastless, and they seemed, like birds, to have hollow bones.

At the next Olympics, in 1996, Dominique Moceanu won a gold medal with the U.S. team when she was fourteen. (She competed with a tibial stress fracture.) Already, though, there was a movement under way to shift the standard age of Olympic hopefuls. There had been, since the nineteen-seventies, age minimums for the gymnasts in the Olympics and world championships, owing to concerns about the pressures of intense training on young athletes. The age requirement was raised, in 1997; gymnasts were only eligible to compete if they turned sixteen within the calendar year. A new scoring system—which more fairly rewarded difficult acrobatics—encouraged many athletes to develop strong, muscular bodies and allowed more mature athletes to show off their power and skills.

Still, there seemed to be a narrow window when gymnasts were strong enough, flexible enough, and fearless enough to withstand the very real dangers and the technical and physical demands of the sport—before they were too broken. Upper-level gymnastics has some of the highest injury rates of any sport. It went unsaid, but was always implicitly suggested, that the mix of relentless dedication, repetition, and routine was better suited for the lives of well-disciplined children than adults with any kind of autonomy. Gymnastics had no off-season. No one took breaks. Coaches often exercised absolute authority. There were prominent examples of Olympians in their twenties, but it certainly wasn’t considered common. The ages of the five members of the 2012 U.S. Olympic team were fifteen, sixteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, respectively.

In 2016, Aly Raisman and Gabby Douglas, two members of the 2012 squad, successfully made the team for the Rio Olympics. Raisman was twenty-two years old at the time. Her teammates affectionately called her Grandma.

But, within a few years, Raisman’s age would have seemed unremarkable. By the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (which were held in 2021, because of the pandemic), the average age of the U.S. team was over twenty-one. “There’s been a lot of misconceptions about women in sports,” Ellen Casey, a doctor at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery who serves as the physician of the U.S.A. Gymnastics women’s national team, told me. It was “one of the big myths in gymnastics”—a “belief,” Casey reiterated, “not fact”—that the height of a female gymnast’s career would come in her mid-teen-age years, and that attempting to improve into her twenties would be “dangerous, if not impossible.” I asked her if there was contrary evidence now. She answered, “It’s happening.”

It is evident this weekend, during the U.S. Gymnastics Olympic Team Trials, which are being held in Minneapolis and will conclude Sunday night. The overwhelming favorite to win the all-around at the upcoming Paris Olympics, Simone Biles, is twenty-seven years old. She is competing more difficult skills, with more power and proficiency, than she did in 2016. Biles is an outlier in almost every way, unquestionably the greatest gymnast in history, but she is not the only gymnast in her twenties who is likely heading to France. Three other members who represented the U.S. at the 2020 Olympics—Sunisa Lee, Jordan Chiles, and Jade Carey—are also strong contenders for spots on this year’s team. Shilese Jones, who is twenty-one, missed nationals with a shoulder injury, and only competed on the uneven bars on the first night of trials after suffering a knee injury during warmups, but, coming into the weekend, she had been considered a near-lock to make the team. Leanne Wong, who is twenty, also made a case for inclusion on the first night.

Perhaps what is most unusual is that many of the top candidates have spent time competing in the N.C.A.A. Before this year, it was rare for Olympic hopefuls to return from collegiate gymnastics to the élite level. “I just didn’t feel like it was even an option for me to do college and then come back,” Raisman told me. Some of this progress has to do with the new name, image, and likeness (N.I.L.) rules, from 2021, which allow college athletes to receive sponsorships. Olympians no longer have to choose, as Wieber did, between profitable endorsements and the chance to be a part of a college team. The expectations at national-team training camps have become more accommodating to college athletes. Some gymnasts have described rediscovering their love of the sport in a less pressurized environment, giving them the motivation to return to élite competition. The surge in interest in women’s sports has also meant that there is a larger pool of sponsorship money available, making it possible for more athletes to support themselves through the sport after they’ve entered adulthood. “Continuing on didn’t seem like a feasible option for a lot of people,” Wieber said, because of financial limitations. Now “the opportunities are just so great.”

But the trend toward older gymnasts predates the introduction of the N.I.L. rules and extends beyond the States. The average age of medal winners at the 2020 Olympics was 20.6, the highest in more than five decades, according to the Washington Post. The German team’s average age was twenty-six; for the Dutch, it was nearly twenty-seven. This year, the trend has continued. The Canadian Ellie Black is likely to make her fourth Olympics. Rebecca Downie, who is thirty-two, was selected to Great Britain’s team, sixteen years after her first appearance in the Games. The Italian Vanessa Ferrari was hoping to make her fifth Olympic team, until a calf injury forced her out of the contest. The vaulter Oksana Chusovitina just ended a bid to make it into the Olympics at the age of forty-eight. One U.S.A. Gymnastics selection-committee member, Chellsie Memmel, attempted a comeback at thirty-two years old, in 2021, after having two children. It isn’t just the ages of the gymnasts that have changed—some of them seem stronger than they did as teen-agers. The way they are being viewed publicly has also shifted as longevity has become normal. “It makes me happy to see gymnasts doing it on their terms,” Raisman told me.

The hope is that these longer careers, Casey, the national-team doctor, said, reflect “changing and improving cultures in gymnastics environments, where people want to continue.”

Last summer, Gabby Douglas, now twenty-eight years old, announced that she was returning to competitive gymnastics. “I didn’t want to end the sport how I did in 2016,” Douglas said, on NBC, before she went on to refer to her mental health.

Back in 2016, the former U.S. Women’s National Team doctor Larry Nassar was publicly accused of sexually assaulting gymnasts. By the time he was sentenced, at the end of the following year, at least two hundred and sixty-five young women had accused him of molestation, including the entire 2012 Olympic squad. (Nassar was sentenced to forty to a hundred and seventy-five years.) The trial and its aftermath convulsed the sport, as gymnasts started to come forward not only with stories of sexual assault but also physical and emotional abuse. Wieber’s coach, John Geddert, was charged with several crimes, including more than twenty counts of human trafficking, and died by suicide, in 2021. Other coaches and staffers were investigated and penalized. The organization of U.S.A. Gymnastics imploded more than once. Training methods that had been considered harsh were now understood to be abusive; what was accepted as normal and necessary became scrutinized. The aftershocks were felt around the world. In many cases, older gymnasts, like Rebecca Downie and Ellie Black, were among those who spoke out most loudly against mistreatment. This reckoning is sweeping other countries, too. For a brief time, the Netherlands suspended their top training program.

I asked Raisman—who was among the most eloquent and outspoken voices among girls and women who were abused by Nassar, and one of the fiercest critics of U.S.A. Gymnastics—if the empowerment of survivors is connected to the increasing longevity of some gymnasts. She was careful with her answer: “I hope that all the speaking out and advocating for change that so many of the survivors have done has helped athletes feel more comfortable advocating for what they need.” Every gymnast is different, she added. And, for all the seismic changes in the sport, the culture and norms are still evolving, not always easily. The biggest coaches—most notably Márta Károlyi, who exercised total control over the Olympic selection process until 2018, along with her husband Béla, who had coached many of the sport’s biggest (and youngest) stars—were among the most authoritarian. But for many years concerns about the ethics of that approach were dismissed because of the sport’s unique demands.

Instead of defaulting to the Károlyis’ methods, many coaches are now considering questions of mental health, recovery, and an athlete’s individual motivation and experience. “What I have seen, and what I have felt in our sport, is a shift in the definition of what makes a good coach,” Wieber said. She is now the head coach at the University of Arkansas. “It’s something I reflect on constantly.”

But, again, the sport remains difficult and dangerous, and requires a level of commitment unheard of in everyday life. That was evident on Friday night, when Kayla DiCello, who had been an alternate at the Tokyo Olympics, suffered an Achilles injury during warmup, and Shilese Jones hurt her knee fifteen minutes later. Two days before, Skye Blakely, who had been among the top candidates for the Olympic team, ruptured her Achilles. When I asked Wieber how much harder it is for older gymnasts to compete, physically, she said that it depended on “how far you pushed your body up until that point—the chronic injuries throughout your career, the surgeries. Some of those tendons and body parts are never quite the same.” At the same time, “during your adult years, there is a sense of autonomy and ownership,” she told me. Some risk of injury is inevitable. But, as more coaches and athletes develop a more humane and more scientific understanding of how the body works and recovers as it ages, the hope is that the rate of some common injuries will decline—and, with an awareness that careers can be longer if managed properly, so will the pressure to compete through those injuries.

A few years ago, the journalist Dvora Meyers wrote a piece for the site 538, titled “Time for the End of the Teen Gymnast,” which made a persuasive case for changing the way that young gymnasts train. After all, there seem to be more possibilities for how to end a gymnasts’ career, but the early years often still look much the same. Gymnastics has one of the earliest ages of specialization—the age at which athletes stop competing in other sports and train year-round—Casey, the physician, said. Early specialization has been linked to higher rates of burnout and overuse injuries. Should an eleven-year-old be subjected to the rigors, sacrifices, and, inevitably, serious injuries related to élite gymnastics? How does puberty affect the trajectory of gymnasts? What might the sport look like with a higher minimum-age limit? These are not easy questions to answer. “I personally think our sport does require an early specialization, because there are so many foundational things that are required—the basics, the form, the flexibility, the strength,” Wieber said. “It’s more ideal if you learn at a younger age. The progression takes years and years of work.” Then she paused. “I say that now, but, just like the age thing, I could be proven wrong at some point.” ♦