The Olympic Disciplines that Destroy the Body

I’m at Deseret, making my case against a number of Winter Olympic sports that destroy bodies, rather than reveal their excellence. Ladies’ quads in figure skating are particularly destructive.

Quads don’t work for older skaters. The physics get hard once a skater is past puberty and begins to develop a woman’s body. Restrictive eating can forestall puberty and growth, but this strategy is abuse of the body, not celebration of its potential. Pushing a child’s body to the limits results in serious injuries that send them into retirement before they’re out of their teens. […]

More and more, the Olympics are a boondoggle for the host country, with massive buildings left to decay when the competition has passed. Athletes are too often treated as similarly disposable. A sport that treats them as something to be used up and discarded between competition cycles is a sport that falls short of what the Olympics should be.

Read the whole thing…