Gold pursuit no longer child's play

They are like the mayfly - ephemeral and fragile. They appear every four years for the cameras as we coo and gasp at their beauty and bounce. They are the tiny tots and when we sink into our sofas at 3.0 a.m., we won't know their names or their life stories, but we will watch them.

As much an image of the Olympic Games as Track and Field, their moment has come around again. The moment of the super-young, the super-flexible, the supercharming. The girls who defy the normal parameters of balance, gravity and grace, then break out crying like babies when things go wrong.

It is a sport where the legendary coach Bela Karolyi once famously said: "The young ones are the greatest little suckers in the world; they will follow you no matter what."

And how right he was. The parents also followed. Karolyi has since drawn back from his original comment. He now claims he wants to reclaim the sport back from the children. A crude u-turn, but overdue as the world watched child gymnastics listing heavily towards dangerous extremes.

"I certainly feel gymnastics is missing some of the maturity of the former great athletes," Karolyi told the New York Times before Atlanta. "Expressiveness, elegance, the great feminine emotional outbreak on the floor, the communication with the crowd."

To many, Karoyli speaking in a different tongue might seem odd. Having received global recognition for bringing such stars as 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci into people's living rooms at Montreal in 1976, Karolyi has been lured out of retirement from his Texas ranch and has taken a philosophical somersault. The naturalised American is now new century rather than pre-Berlin Wall.

His child perfectionist Comaneci achieved the seemingly impossible score of 10 seven times, a feat so unexpected that the scoring technology of the time, set up for only three digits, was unable to cope. Her 10.00 scores were displayed at 1.00.

But Karoyli is back and selling a new product. In truth, the change began before Atlanta after the facade of 13-year-old prodigies as characters from the school play had cracked, revealing a more sinister, intense and gruelling background.

Karoyli, above all, took flack as women found it impossible to infiltrate the sport of girls. Kristie Phillips, a star in the late 1980s who developed an eating disorder, accused the coach of insulting her and of insisting she take laxatives and diuretics to lose weight. Karoyli strongly denied the accusations.

In 1994, Christy Henrich, an up-and-coming starlet, developed bulimia and anorexia nervosa and when she died of multiple organ failure she weighed just 61 pounds.

Last year, the former Soviet star Olga Korbut, who won four gold medals at the 1972 games in Munich and the 1976 games in Montreal, claimed that she had been sexually harassed by her former coach Renald Kynsh, who forced her to have sex with him at 15.

She said her sexual relations lasted for several years until Knysh started having sex with another athlete.

The 1970s and '80s was an unhealthy era in child sport where young girls were committed to rigorous training and difficult, spectacular stunts. Concerns about eating disorders, the arresting of menstruation and bone density peaked with the death of Henrich.

In the 1990s other cases of abuse emerged: American Dominique Moceanu was 4 ft 6 in tall when she won the gold medal at Atlanta. Three years later it emerged during a court case when she "divorced" her Romanian emigre parents, that her father Dumitru had routinely slapped her for failing to maintain her weight, eating sweets and performing poorly in the gym.

He told her that her training began as a new-born baby when she was left hanging from the clothesline by her hands. Police also had information that he had arranged contracts to murder coach Luminita Misceno, who had replaced Karolyi after the Atlanta Games, and her friend Brian Huggins. He had also squandered the family fortune.

At the beginning of this year Moceanu was 5 ft 2 in tall and 30 pounds heavier. She had developed the body of a young woman. After long months with surgeons, doctors and physiotherapists, who treated recurring injuries to her back, knees and shin, she has recovered.

We are asked now to believe that things have changed and gymnastics has embraced glasnost. Following on from the dark experiences of pubescent tennis players burning up on the professional tour, gymnastics has also set the bar at a higher age of 16.

After a decade of taking a beating, the child-aware offensive is on stream - in the US at least. Ironically, by diluting the charm, officials seek to make the sport more acceptable.

But that is the United States, where the square-pegged Karoyli has, for now, been hammered into a round hole. US gymnastics are not just fighting the notion that a waifish physique is a prerequisite for winning, but also the mantra that thin is better. Officials in the US have become so sensitive over the issue and so fearful of another Henrich tragedy, which could again plunge the sport into ignominy, that it no longer lists athletes' weights in the media guide or releases such information to the public.

Four years ago Kerri Strug did what few could have expected in rehabilitating the sport's image and also left the US with an impossibly difficult act to follow in Sydney. Strug was also coached by Karoyli, but the lasting images of Atlanta are the pictures of the gymnast hopping around on one foot with a badly-injured ankle after nailing her final vault to give America their historic team gold.

Scooped up by Karoyli and carried off the a mat to a waiting stretcher, Strug left the capacity crowd in the Georgia Dome in tears and exited to a standing ovation. She was oblivious to the fact that her team had just won gold.

This year the cameras are already poised. They instinctively know from what corner of the gym the sparkle will come. Initially they will focus on Svetlana Khorkina, the elegant 21-year-old Russian who has put her acting and modelling career on hold for one more shot at Olympic glory.

Written off after a 12th place in the World Championships last year, four gold medals including an all-round title at the European Championships in May has thrust the "grizzled veteran" back into the frame.

Her team-mates, Yelena Produnova and Yelena Zamolodchikova, should help to win the team gold for Russia, if they do not choke as they did in the 1999 World Championships. Romania, with world champion Maria Olaru, are expected to take the silver team award but are jinxed and have never won at a non-boycotted Olympic Games.

The stage is set for veterans to weave their magic. In many of the competitors there will be 10 years in the difference between their ages and those of Korbut and Comaneci. There, at least, things have moved on.