“Why in the World Are We Sending 11-Year-Olds to the Olympics?”, The New York Times

By Linda Flanagan, July 26, 2024

Ms. Flanagan is the author of “Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports — and Why It Matters.”

Why in the World Are We Sending 11-Year-Olds to the Olympics?

Credit…Yann Bastard

When the Olympics arrive and I hear the familiar kettle drums of the Games’ fanfare music I’m always catapulted back to 1972, when the Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut dazzled the world on the uneven parallel bars. As a kid, I watched transfixed. For the rest of the summer and to the great irritation of my parents and older siblings, I usurped the living room to practice my handstands, cartwheels and round-offs, all while fantasizing about the feel of a gold medal hanging from my neck. Demonstrations of astonishing athleticism will have that effect on children.

It’s for precisely that reason — the unique power of the Olympics to captivate the imaginations of the young and inspire excesses in adults — that we should feel queasy about an 11-year-old skateboarder from China competing in the Paris Games.

She’s not an aberration: Some of the medalists in skateboarding in the 2021 Tokyo Games were 12 and 13, and other competitors this year are as young as 14. These children have inarguably earned their spot at the Olympics. But watching preteens and teens contend on a global stage warps our expectations of children’s athletics and distorts our thinking about the place of sports in all children’s lives.

Almost a century ago, this country radically rethought the relationship of children and labor, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 imposed minimum age requirements for work and limited the number of hours that some children could be employed. We should do the same with sports, starting with instituting a universal minimum age for competing in the Olympic Games and other international championships.

We need a model for youth sports that isn’t hellbent on producing Olympians and that abolishes the early sorting of child athletes based on perceived ability. What’s best for kids — including that tiny subset who might grow up to become Olympians — is lots of outdoor free play, exposure to a variety of athletic options and an approach to youth athletics that promotes widespread participation and sparks engagement and joy.

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The International Olympic Committee imposes no limits on competitors’ ages, leaving that decision to the international federations that govern each sport, so standards vary. In track and field, World Athletics requires competitors to be at least 16, while its counterpart in swimming, World Aquatics, sets the age at 14. The upshot? Who competes in Paris this summer is determined by a jumble of rules dictated by international and national governing bodies.

Olympic events such as skateboarding are attracting ever-younger competitors, but children have long been present at the Games. A 10-year-old competed for Greece in gymnastics in 1896, and an 11-year-old competed for Romania in figure skating in 1968. Champion gymnasts and figure skaters, including Nadia Comaneci and Tara Lipinski, routinely compete at 14 or 15.

It’s hard not to swoon over these athletic wunderkinds. But there’s a disturbing record of adult athletes speaking out about the downside of their demanding youthful pursuits.

Michael Phelps, the decorated swimmer who appeared at the Sydney Olympics at 15, has talked about the damaging pressure he endured as a young man, training for five to six hours a day. In her memoir, the Olympic figure skater Gracie Gold shared the disbelief she felt at age 10 watching eager parents hand their kids over to a coach who shamed children as young as 8. Dominique Dawes, a three-time Olympian who also debuted at 15, condemned gymnastics’ culture for tolerating the mistreatment of children: “While I might have reached the pinnacle in the sport, it was a very harmful environment, physically, verbally, emotionally, and it’s not worth the sacrifice; it’s not worth the cost.”

Even if parents aren’t interested in pushing their children to the Olympic level, they’re still being asked to commit exorbitant amounts of money and time for their children’s athletic endeavors — while children from low-income homes are too often priced out altogether. In 2022, the Aspen Institute reported that parents spent an annual average of $883 per child’s primary sport. According to a Harris Poll survey, families who opt for private clubs and teams pay up to $1,000 a month. Nineteen percent of the parents of children in competitive sports reported spending at least 20 hours a week on their child’s pursuits.

Devoting such resources makes sense if you hope, as a third of the parents in the survey do, that your child will make it to the Olympics or play professionally. But the overwhelming majority of the kids won’t — yet they’re still stuck in a system that allows scant room for dabbling in multiple sports or for indulging in nonathletic pursuits.

There are better models for children’s athletics that the United States can learn from. Norway’s national sports system prohibits child athletes from participating in national, European or World championships before age 13, and it has not resulted in diminished results: Norway won 37 medals during the 2022 Winter Olympics, compared with America’s 25. Norway’s commitment is codified in the Children’s Rights in Sport, a policy that protects a child’s right “to choose which sport or how many sports they wish to participate in.”

In America, the Aspen Institute has devised a similar set of guidelines titled the Children’s Bill of Rights in Sports, calling for age-appropriate play, respectful treatment of children and capable leadership. Hundreds of athletes, educators and national sports organizations support the policy and, in May, Maryland became the first state to officially endorse it. The next step should be federal legislation that imposes a minimum age standard for U.S. athletes in all international competitions.

When you hear the Olympic theme this year, applaud all you want for the impressive youngsters competing in Paris. But we owe it to them, and to our own non-Olympian kids, to start putting the children’s interests first.

Linda Flanagan is the author of “Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports — and Why It Matters.”