Maggie Nichols’ book, “Unstoppable “

[rlayt]

Like many others I got he book that recently came out. Camp stories, Marta telling her she looks puffy, being told to never stop at McDonalds( she wasn’t), training hard, being advised that carbs are death. All the usual horrors. I haven’t gotten to the LN parts yet and I’m going to speed through that.

Her eating plan caused bowel issues. “Over time I developed stomach issues. This may be TMI, but I think it’s important to be honest about what going to extremes can do to your body. Basically, I couldn’t move my bowels—I would eat something and then my stomach would blow up.”

P.S. Steve Penny is even more of an utter asshole then I thought..

 

[RedBirdie]

People magazine had an excerpt. Horrifying that she was down to 6.5% body fat and Marta was still calling her heavy.

 

[Big_rock_show]

Steve Penny is an absolute slime ball.

 

[blake]

Gymnastics is anti-science in some regards. The medical community has known since the 90s that the female athlete triad is a real and dangerous thing - it even decreases adult immune function. There's loads of scientific literature on the youth sports specialization increasing risk of burnout and injury. Weight tends to fluctuate by time of day and losing more than 2-3 pounds a week is not considered healthy or sustainable. There's so many practices and accepted norms in US gymnastics that are proven to be counterproductive by sports scientists. It's a tragedy that while USAG was making money off them, so many young athletes were not given proper nutritional care or consideration for the impact on their long-term quality of life.

 

[rlayt]

Shamed for eating a banana. It’s a wonder those women and girls manage to do anything on what little they ate. I hope Ms. Chicken-Fruit-Chicken doesn’t let anyone do that now.

 

[blake]

This should be Marta's punishment in the afterlife. Forced to eat the foods she confiscated and forbade for eternity.

 

[JoseM]

People magazine had an excerpt. Horrifying that she was down to 6.5% body fat and Marta was still calling her heavy.

Only 6.5% body fat, starving herself, and still called fat and heavy? Insane!!

José M.

 

[hmmmm]

Only 6.5% body fat, starving herself, and still called fat and heavy? Insane!!

José M.

I wonder if these athletes just looked 'puffy' due to the body's response to all the over training, stress, inflammation and poor nutrition?

 

[falcon9]

Here is the book...

Amazon.com

 

[onodian]

She really got the short stick of all this too, as far as gymnastics "career" goes (which, i mean, f* that in the context, but still, she worked so much for it). The consensus in the community is she should have been in the Olympic Team right? at the veeeery least as an alternate?

 

[ArnoldRimmer]

She really got the short stick of all this too, as far as gymnastics "career" goes (which, i mean, f* that in the context, but still, she worked so much for it). The consensus in the community is she should have been in the Olympic Team right? at the veeeery least as an alternate?

Noooooo, not in the slightest. Her injury hampered her in 2016, so she was never able to show good enough work to justify a team spot. Nearly everyone thinks she could legitimately have been an alternate, but I don't get the impression most people think she definitely should've. She had an arguable case.

Where the majority seem to think she was wronged is not being given an AA spot at 2015 worlds.

 

[arabiandoublefront]

She really got the short stick of all this too, as far as gymnastics "career" goes (which, i mean, f* that in the context, but still, she worked so much for it). The consensus in the community is she should have been in the Olympic Team right? at the veeeery least as an alternate?

I won't speak for everyone here, but given what she presented in 2016, I'm not quite sure she had a 100% convincing argument to be named alternate. If Skinner was fourth at Trials and skipped over for a spot on the main team, it doesn't suprise me that Nichols was sixth and skipped over for an alternate spot. Looking at the bars scores, I wouldn't leave Douglas, nor Kocian, behind. I don't blame them for selecting Skinner and Smith as alternates because their all-around scores at trials were better than Nichols. Maybe there's an argument for Nichols over Lockyear, but I'm assuming they wanted one alternate with a great bars score. For a lot of gymnastics fans, I think Nichols is just one of those gymnasts they couldn't help but root for, so they think she got the short end of the stick, but poorly timed injuries do happen.

 

[RedBirdie]

From what I recall, the WWG consensus was the Nichols was scored with a very different pen than Skinner and Smith at Trials. (And Raisman. God damn, thinking about how she was scored still makes me rage)

 

[makam]

From what I recall, the WWG consensus was the Nichols was scored with a very different pen than Skinner and Smith at Trials. (And Raisman. God damn, thinking about how she was scored still makes me rage)

Yeah. My memory is poor but I think I was on team Maggie because she was showing an upward trajectory and would probably have been great by the time the Olympics happened. But there just wasn't room for her on the team unless you lost Laurie (or maybe Aly) and they both made better cases for themselves. You had to have Simone and Maddy and Gabby's bars and solid other events gave her the edge. As for alternates, she would have been a great AA alternate but Martha picked event alternates. Skinner for vault and maybe floor, Ragan for beam and maybe floor, Ashton for bars. If any of them were injured, Maggie would have been the obvious alternate, but it didn't happen that way.

If she had had maybe 1 more month to train and Haney had 1 more month to break Laurie, it could have been very different.

 

[MaryClare]

I think 2016 is the one genuine example where the depth in the US would have resulted in the B team winning silver. There were always going to be hard luck stories and controversial decisions.

That is quite separate from the emotional and physical abuse that Maggie Nichols and others received at the hands of the programme.

 

[Laura722]

Martha screaming at her over a banana reminds me of Bela blowing up at Erica Stokes for eating a peach.

I saw an excerpt on People where she mentioned a coach saying she looked like a marshmallow. Did she say who that coach was?

Former Team USA Gymnast Maggie Nichols on weigh-ins and the 'pressure to be thin': 'Food became a struggle' (Exclusive excerpt)

In an exclusive excerpt from her new memoir, former Team USA Gymnast Maggie Nichols, 26, describes the 'pressure to be thin': 'Food became a struggle for me'. The world champion says she was so worried before weigh-ins, she'd take out her hair clips and "spit into the toilet" to get rid of more...

people.com

One day a coach put me in front of a mirror and asked what I saw. “I don’t know. Me?” I said, not sure what answer she was looking for. “No,” she said. “You’re puffy. You look puffy. Like a marshmallow.” I remember that vividly. I was so young, and that’s not the way I saw myself at all. But she insisted that I stay after my already long and grueling practice every day and run on the treadmill for 45 minutes. I did that for almost a year.

 

[RedBirdie]

Had to have been someone at TCT, possibly even Sarah Jantzi. I believe Maggie spent her entire gymnastics career there.

 

[Laura722]

Had to have been someone at TCT, possibly even Sarah Jantzi. I believe Maggie spent her entire gymnastics career there.

That's what I thought, but then I saw Sarah Jantzi and TCT promoting and praising Maggie's book on Instagram. That's a little weird if it was her.

 

[Beamer]

Yes, Maggie was scored unfairly low at Trials. But even had she been scored fairly, she wouldn't have made the team.

Maggie's gymnastics at the time was not suited for the 5-3-3 team finals format because she didn't put up a huge number on any of the four events. Rather, she was merely good on all four events.

Her DTY was comparable to Laurie's and Gabby's for that third vaulter, certainly not the score that Aly's Amanars were getting or Simone's vaults. On bars, she was nowhere near Gabby or Madison. On beam, she was weaker than all 3 of Aly, Laurie, and Simone. And on floor, she was close to Laurie but nowhere near Aly or Simone.

Conversely, every one of the 5 athletes selected had a huge scoring routine:

Gabby: UB
Madison: UB
Laurie: BB
Aly: FX and VT
Simone: VT, BB, FX

Maggie would have needed an Amanar that was better than her 2015 Amanar to even have a chance, and it likely still wouldn't have been enough.

Maggie's gymnastics in 2016 was well suited for a 6-6-5 format (used, for example at the 1992 Olympics) where all gymnasts had to compete on all apparatuses. Atler, on the other hand, was the opposite and suited for a 5-3-3 or 6-3-3 team where event specialists were the name of the game. What could have been.

 

[rlayt]

See, i thought it could have been someone who wasn’t at TCT because of the sentence before that about camp.”But all eyes are on you at camp”. That implies it happened at camp.