Sportsfrog.com

looking for something to watch. Preferably something sporting, but possibly “Real Genius” or “The Mummy.” The menu at the bottom of my digital cable display reads “US Olympic Team Trials.” How very sporting. So I click, expecting to see some swimming or track and field. The program is at commercial. So I bide my time, drinking a Gatorade to replenish some of the dehydration brought on by an epic pool party and a round of golf in the preceding twenty-four hours.

I was fully prepared to over-muscled men or good looking girls in swim suits. Instead, I got a combination of the two — a group of over-muscled girls. And yet, I was strangely intrigued. Or ,I should say, my wife was, and so I became intrigued by association.

Normally, especially since some of the actresses in this fine play are of age (Alicia Sacramone, Chelsea Memmel), owing to a rule that does not allow girls younger then fourteen to participate for a spot in the team, I wouldn’t have any issue watching young women bound around wearing skimpy outfits, especially since I didn’t even have to keep a supply of singles handy. Except that this wasn’t normal.

This wasn’t normal at all.

These girls are sexless. Their bodies, either through nutrition, training, both or through some other way, are similar to that of elite soccer players. Thick calves, bulging thighs, thin waists, scrawny chests, hair pulled back out of their faces. Twenty-year-old girls look fifteen. Sixteen-year-olds look twelve. These girls will get carded for cigarettes and booze until they’re forty-five.

I assume they’ll need the cigarettes and booze to deal with their lives after gymnastics. Not only is peaking as an athlete/person at sixteen hard, and enough to drive anyone to drink — maybe I peaked at sixteen, come to think of it, but then you add in that they all look so unhappy. All, that is, except Shawn Johnson, the reigning World Champ and lynchpin to the US roster — a veritable cauldron of smiling teeth and teenage exuberance. Still you get the suspicion that even her bubbliness is maybe just a little manufactured.

And then it hits you why these girls look like this.

1) They are judged, harshly I might add, for even the slightest missteps, both figurative and literal. Took a hop on your landing after twisting eighteen times in the air as you completed your vault? Deduction. Leg one degree off vertical enough on that uneven bars routine? See you in four years, Sweetie. Step outside the white line after running full speed before three tumbles and vertical jumps that would make LeBron jealous? Pack your bags. Foot not dead square on a four-inch wide beam after a stupid (read: ridiculously impossible) double-twist from a flat-footed jump? Don’t let the door hit you on the glutes on the way out.

2) The reputations preceded the girls. For all intents and purposes, I could tell no difference between Johnson’s floor routine and that of Memmel. The consensus in the AB household was that Memmel had stuck more landings and been Johnson’s equal in all except smile wattage. Yet the scores were nowhere near as close. It may have something to do with the degree of difficulty in the new scoring system (gone are the days of the perfect ten), but it all looked pretty difficult to me.

3) None of the girls look like they would save any of the others from a burning building, let alone want to be a teammate with them and work towards a common gold. There was more frostiness in the post-routine hugs than at a Wendy’s on free dessert day. The exceptions to this rule were the older girls. Their smiles seemed real, they seemed to want the others to do well — they seemed mature. One hopes that at some point all the girls come to realize that the competition isn’t everything. Another girl doing .005 better than you today doesn’t make you a failure.

4) The coaches. If you thought the judges were hard to please, then the coaches were impossible. If the coaches were to have scored the routines, no one would have had higher than a 5 or wherever maximum deductions would leave a score. After routines that the judges actually liked the coaches scowled and lectured the competitors. The girls took it on the chin every time, not one of them offering even the tiniest of rebuttals.

This, however, is where you might come to realize that Johnson’s smiles are real. After each of her routines, her coach, a Chinese national going to his hometown for the Olympics, would meet her with smiles and hugs. Maybe Johnson smiles because she, unlike the rest, is truly happy. Maybe her coach smiles because she doesn’t make mistakes. Maybe it’s a combination of both. Maybe other coaches could be more positive, though, and see if it changes not only the disposition of their athletes, but their performance as well.

Most people work better when there’s a reward. For most of us it’s a paycheck on Friday. Then maybe the boss tells us we did a great job on a report. That feels good. What doesn’t is when you file that report that you put a lot of time into, a very good report if you do say so yourself, and the boss dismisses it or lectures you about the color you used in a chart on page sixteen. That’s not a fun environment.

Yet it’s exactly the environment these girls find themselves in every day. Maybe that’s why they all look so unhappy.

In a few weeks some girls, from the US or from another country, will stand atop a three-tiered platform, infinitesimally better than the two girls standing on steps slightly lower than hers. That girl on the highest will be the only one truly happy, and maybe not even she, all things considered. A gold medal can only brighten things up so much.

(I just wrote 1,000 words on gymnastics. This whole Tiger Woods being out for the season is going to be harder than I ever imagined.)