Sandy Woolsey didn't know Christy Henrich well during the couple of years they competed together on the U.S. national gymnastics team, but maybe she should have. They had a few things in common.
Both were participants in the cruel and strange sisterhood of starving gymnasts, training long hours on little or no food, day in and day out. Both suffered from the eating disorders that plague the sport. Both had naturally stocky body types, but wished to be something else, something much thinner. And both were driven out of the sport because of it.Woolsey quit elite gymnastics before the spartan lifestyle got the best of her; Henrich quit too, but she wasn't so lucky. She died last month of complications resulting from her eating disorders.
Perhaps the sport did Woolsey a favor after all when it so cruelly sent her packing. In 1991, Woolsey finished second in the all-around at the U.S. championships, which should have given her an automatic berth on the world championships team. Instead, her coaches dismissed her from the team because she was, in their view, too big, at 5-foot, 100 pounds. She was good enough; she just wasn't thin enough.
Injured and worn down by the obsessive training and dieting, she dropped out of international gymnastics a few months later and eventually came to the University of Utah, where she has found refuge and sanity in gymnastics again, although her past still haunts.
Who knows, maybe the coaches who cut her from the U.S. team saved her life or, more likely, improved the quality of it.
When Woolsey heard of Henrich's plight last year, she called to lend her support, but, like one recovering alcoholic befriending another, she was reluctant to get too close, wary of being drawn into that addictive lifestyle again. When Woolsey heard of Henrich's death, she says, "I was relieved, because it was something she was going to have to fight for the rest of my life. I felt like she was in a losing battle."
Woolsey knows the feeling. "I could have easily gone to that extreme," she says. "When I was doing it, it felt like it was not me."
If misery loves company, then at least there was that. Woolsey recalls an entire underworld of famished girl gymnasts during her five years of international competition.
"For one thing, you never see anyone eat, and if you do it's just a little bit of bread," she says. "You could tell by the faces what they were going through. They had bags under their eyes and they were very tired and gaunt, just very tiny. They hadn't gone through puberty. If you keep your body fat low enough, you won't start puberty.
"You had to be secretive (about eating) because people were watching you. When I ate, my plate was inspected by judges and coaches to see if I was eating bad food - if it had fat or too many calories or if I had too much. They'd come by to say `hi,' but we (the national team) knew they were focusing on our plates.
"It was an unwritten rule that you never eat everything that's on your plate. You want it to look like you still have a lot left when you're finished. We'd eat as late (in the morning) as we could, so it would be breakfast and lunch. Some athletes who had really strict coaches would call and ask me to sneak them food."
For her part, Woolsey tried all of the obsessive and dangerous dieting methods of the sport. She began gymnastics at 6 and left home at 14 to pursue her dream of making the Olympic team. At 16, she made the national team, but already coaches were watching her weight and weigh-ins were part of her daily routine. She weighed only 100 pounds, but compared to her 80-pound teammates she looked like a linebacker. Her training partner in those days was skinny; Woolsey was not. "She was told to eat, I was told not to eat," says Woolsey.
Sometimes she wouldn't eat at all. Sometimes she ate and then took laxatives, or threw up, although she could barely bring herself to induce the latter ("It's hard work," she says).
She also trained eight hours a day, powered by little fuel except ambition and obsession. It was a vicious circle. If she surrendered to hunger and ate even an apple, she felt failure and guilt, so she immediately ran a couple of miles to burn more calories, and then she was back where she started, hungry. She felt more guilt if she went to bed without hunger pains.
One coach told Woolsey that eating is psychological, that she didn't need it. Woolsey was once turned in to her coach for sneaking a DIET Coke, which she denied. "I knew it wasn't true," he told her. "I knew you were too dedicated for that."
She also was talented. At 17, Woolsey placed eighth in the all-around at the 1989 World Championships. Two years later she was cut from the world championships team.
"The coaches actually voted to see who was on the team," she said. "I was voted off. They said I was too big to be on the team . . . They want you to continue to look like you're 12. But even when I was 12, I wasn't skinny. I'm not that body type."
A few months later, Woolsey retired from elite gymnastics at the relatively advanced age of 19. Her body took revenge. She ate modestly, but her body clutched every calorie. Her weight climbed to 130 pounds, which probably caused the chronic shin splints that forced her to skip floor and vault competitions during this year's collegiate season. Nevertheless, she tied for first place on the uneven bars at the NCAA championships.
That success notwithstanding, Woolsey still battles her old demons. "I feel like someday I'll be happy with myself, but two years after all that happened, I still can't say I'm over it," she says. "I'm still preoccupied with what I look like, what I weigh. Doing it the healthy way doesn't always produce as fast of results as other methods. Sometimes I think it would be easier if I just didn't eat, but I know that isn't healthy and it won't help in the long term. It's always a struggle."