new on tumblr

I will start by explaining a couple of examples of this with the team Tutberidze.

The team Tutberidze is managerd by Eteri Tutberidze and is mostly known for her olimpic winners, all being trained through their early teen years until they're able to finally get to the olímpics.

Issue is, the way she trains them, notably to do quads, is via starving them (they're not allowed to drink any water or eat anything on competition days as Alina has mentioned before), the main way you can do quads is if you weigh very little.

So she focuses on that, low body weight, and forgoes a lot of strength training that is not needed for that technique. Now, in the early teens everything is okay, issue comes at 16-17.

Yulia Lipnitwkaya, in 2014, was the first in this long line of hers. She did great in her individual olimpic category and went home with gold through the team event.

When she went back to Russia her body started crumbling down, all her skills slowly diminished, her technique became poorer and failed most jumps.

At 19 she retired from competitive skating.

Then there's Evgenia Medvedveva, she went undefeated for two years after junior categories had been fully won. She then went to the olimpics.

She was 17-18 when she went to the olímpics with her teammate Alina Zagitova (being 15 and much less injured). Six months before the olimpics Evgenia fractured her foot, which she still skated on during europeans being beaten by her teammate Alina.

She went to the olímpics still, both skated great, Alina won by 1.31 points and for the first time Evgenia cried in a competition. After 11 years of training under Eteri she went to another team in Canada.

Alina slowly lost her skills at 16 and by 17 announced she was going to take a pause in competitive figure skating. At 19 she left competitive and was hospitalized for three months to battle her anorexia.

Eteri has never been able to train boys into the Olympics (in single category) as far as i know, this plus how all this athletes slowly crumbled down physically after a certain age has created the term "the Eteri Expiration Date" which is 17 years old.

My specific case was similar, artistic/sincronised swimming, competitive training that favored girls of 11-15 and while we trained our strength and all, it was favored to be on that skinny side, not fit, low body weight focus.

My chronic pain started at 15 with my articulations then moved to my back with the scoliosis at 16. By 17 I stopped going to training for personal reasons.

At 18-19 I was also battling with anorexia and semi successfully got out of it on my own, to this day I still have to battle with that way of thinking.

I recently had the chance to talk with one of my old teammates, she basically told me our trainer ignored questions about me when they asked why I wasn't there anymore.

Most importantly, I asked her about the physical side, if she remembered it being LIKE THAT, now, she doesn't have any physical disabilities, but she did leave at 15 a year later (she was younger than me) and did agree that the training was brutal, bruises were common nearly every week, and that our trainer was probably thinking Olympics when training us. Plus, she also went through ED issues.

I'm not sure if this is a few isolated cases or this is a genuine phenomenon at this point, I always second guess myself, so.

If you have had this experience, know someone, have any more info on this, etc. Please comment it.

I won't make a paper or anything but putting a name to it, or maybe there already is one, would help.