Me, too, from WI originally, and going there tomorrow as a matter of fact.
OMG this brings up so many memories. I hadn’t even remembered the abbreviation GGMB until I was looking for other forums tonight after watching the Olympics. Haven’t looked at gym forums for many years.
The guy who wrote the Mogilny was I think a long time participant on the GGMB board, who went by the name “SlimShady” for a while, and used to talk about a “Chupacabra”, whatever that was, or whatever it meant to him. The Mogilny was like the Onion of gymnastics. He had a girlfriend and they talked about her pregnancy, which was a fiction, and maybe the girlfriend was a fiction, too.
It is so true that GGMB and Abomb were abusive. It’s kind of validating to read your description of the toxicity. At one point they had an in joke about Nazis, and a swastika on the home page, and that was really uncomfortable. I mean they thought it was a joke for the insiders, but to anyone else who stumbled upon the website, it was offensive, but Abomb and his acolytes were so convinced of their being at the center of the universe, they couldn’t see how it appeared to others. At first he and the board was amusing, and it was open to everyone. I think they suffered several bans from forum platforms, and moved around from hosting service to hosting service for a while – I probably saw them on several different servers, and this was before 2008.
If you didn’t read every thread on that board and know all the details of everything that was going on, probably particularly the threads in which Abomb had a personal opinion and stake, and if you innocently said you liked a gymnast that he didn’t like or something, you were attacked or mocked. I saw the writing on the wall that they were going to want to ban me, and I left, but had I stayed I probably would have been banned.
One of the funniest threads I ever read was on that board about a coach, and it implied she was doing favors for the powers that be in USA Gymnastics. It was not very nice. I’m not proud of it, but my eyes were wet from laughing. Also, I met some other gym fans in the SF Bay Area on that board and we got together to watch the Olympics at someone’s house a few times, and together we went to a Cal meet with UCLA and briefly met Miss Val, UCLA’s coach/choreographer, who was held in high esteem on that board.
I met someone who was an epidemiologist on that board, who had previously done scoring for the writing part of college admissions exams, and she helped me to copy edit some of my papers in grad school, because I am a terrible writer, and that was so kind and helpful. I appreciate her help to this day.
Then I moved to another board. It was before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. There was a poster who was “all China, all the time”, and we suspected that she was put there by the Chinese government, because she kept insisting there was no age falsification by the Chinese, and any time anyone said anything less than flattering about the Chinese team, she was there to jump in with some positive PR.
There were a lot of video montages posted and gym videos shared, some of which I downloaded and saved on CDs, pre-YouTube, and someone sent out CDs of the holy grail: a video of the Olomouc meet, which was rumored for several years, and amazingly was actually unearthed, and I have the CD that someone sent to me of the Olomouc meet, held by eastern bloc countries as an alternative to the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, which was boycotted by most of the eastern bloc countries. The videos are very grainy.
There was a lot of colorful commentary and people saying things they would probably only say anonymously behind the veil of the Internet. There were unending religious wars about who was robbed in this meet or that meet, and people would not let it go, to the point that after the amusement factor receded, you saw those threads and thought “been there, done that” and moved on … This was before Instagram and all the social media of today. So many of the names listed above, that I haven’t thought of for many years, ring a bell: Rafiki, Shanfan, OOBN, ShanessaDomi, FakeArmineB.
Also, one thing that was amazing was that as the board migrated from host to host, as it got shutdown by these different servers, and you got an error message when you logged in, was that everybody quickly found where the next board was and created new accounts, and in a day or two, it seemed like a thousand users had migrated by osmosis!
