Some of those girl gymnasts are painfully thin. I hate to think they are starved to keep them small and limber to do their gymnastic routines. Perhaps that is going on.
Mary Lou Retton changed all of that, didn’t she?
I was a gymnast around that time- keeping a young girl’s weight down delayed puberty. Going through puberty caused hips to widen and changed the center of gravity which affected performance.
Female gymnasts stay as thin as possible for them to be healthy enough to compete so they can delay going through puberty. My granddaughter was tapped for training at an elite gym and my daughter and my son-in-law were considering it until they were told that she would need to lose at least 10 lbs. This would have put her weighing 85 lbs at 5’2”. At that point, they pulled her from competition level gymnastics.
My granddaughter was really upset for a while. It took several months for her to except the fact that what the coaches were asking was not healthy. Eating disorders have been a dirty little secret in the gymnastics world for a long time. I think the only activities worse for eating orders than gymnastics would be beauty pageants and modeling.