The Rise of the Adult Gymnast
7 min read
In 2016, the two-time Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman was known for her incredible floor routine … and penchant for naps. Raisman, the oldest member of the team, took the chance to snooze whenever she could get it. Simone Biles jokingly called her “our sleeping little grandma.” Raisman was 22 years old. So, you know, ancient.
By 2021, at the Tokyo Olympics, Biles was 24 and had earned the “grandma” nickname herself. This year, Biles is 27, she’s competing at her third Olympics, and the average age of an athlete on the U.S. women’s gymnastics team is about 22 and a half. Biles recently apologized to Raisman, saying that she’s learned what it’s like to be a “grandma.” Her body hurts more. She needs more rest after competitions. And I have to say: I feel her pain.
I myself am a gymnast—and I’m turning 40 this year. Unfortunately, I didn’t make the 2024 Olympic Team. I’m watching all those grandma gymnasts from home, with my adult gymnastics squad. The youngest among us are in their 20s; the oldest is in her 50s. About half of the team had never done gymnastics before joining this class. We train together two days a week and compete a few times a year. At our gym, when the little girls learn new skills, they get a beaded jewel. When we do, we win an Advil. We need more naps than Raisman or Biles, but you couldn’t pay us to stay home from class.
In the past decade, interest in adult gymnastics has exploded, coinciding with the growing age of champions around the world. For years, successful female gymnasts traditionally peaked at 15 or 16 years old. Many trained under abusive conditions. They competed for their coaches or their countries, not themselves. But now gymnastics is dominated by women in their mid- to late 20s (and even early 30s) who want to win on their own terms. Their longevity is inspiring more grown-ups, both amateur and professional, to return to the sport—and encouraging others, who might never have thought gymnastics would welcome them, to learn to flip too.
Unlike me, Stacey Tirro didn’t do gymnastics as a child. But when she saw the joy on her kids’ faces as they bounced on a trampoline in their gymnastics classes, she decided she also wanted to experience that. So what if she was 36, practically dead in gymnastics years? In 2008, she worked up the courage to join that gym’s adult class. She’s been tracking her progress under the name “The Geriatric Gymnast” ever since.
Tirro was lucky there was a class to join at all. In the early 2010s, grown-up gymnasts were pretty much on their own. Insurance for adult classes is expensive, so the most common options were “open gym sessions”—essentially, loosely supervised free-for-alls where you could bounce on the trampoline and launch yourself into the foam pit, but where you wouldn’t necessarily learn much. Gina Paulhus, who was in her 20s at the time, did take classes but told me she had to train with high-school girls. Eager to find gymnasts her own age, she started a Facebook group called “Just like fine wine … Adult Gymnastics Group” in 2014. She later founded an Adult Gymnastics Camp. But Tirro and Paulhus were outliers. In general, serious gymnastics—the kind where you go and learn skills and try to get better—was still just for kids.
That’s largely because, starting in the 1970s, coaches in America perceived “little girls in pretty boxes” as more trainable than adults. Well into the 2010s, a brutal coaching culture remained: Keep ’em weak, keep ’em hungry, keep ’em doubtful and dependent. That, the conventional wisdom went, was the only way to win. Girls did what they were told—and when they were too physically or mentally broken, they were disposed of. The long line of little girls desperate to go to the Olympics never ended, after all.
This culture was set in part by the most notorious coaches of the modern era: Béla and Márta Károlyi. From the 1970s to the late ’90s, Béla coached and took credit for the successes of the Olympians Nadia Comăneci, Mary Lou Retton, Kim Zmeskal, Betty Okino—and a dozen more gymnasts you may have heard of but hundreds more you likely haven’t. His methods were ruthless. In 1991, another high-level coach said that Károlyi gymnasts “don’t so much retire as expire.” Béla’s wife, Márta, was in charge of the U.S. women’s national team from 2001 to 2016, training them at the “Károlyi Ranch.” According to an independent investigation commissioned by the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, no parents were allowed there during training camps. Biles has said that she and other underfed gymnasts broke into the cafeteria at night to steal food. The Ranch was also where several gymnasts say the former national-team doctor Larry Nassar sexually abused them under the guise of medical care. (Márta later said that she felt “extremely bad” about Nassar’s abuse but that she didn’t “feel responsible.” The Károlyis also denied claims that they themselves were abusive.)
This culture trickled down, and coaches around the country modeled their practices after the Károlyis. Many believed the lie that broken bones and broken spirits were signs of hard work. As a kid, my teammates and I never rose to the level of Biles or Raisman. But our coaches still gave us cruel nicknames related to our weight, pitted us against one another, and pushed us to train on injured limbs. We were too afraid to mention our pain. We were kids. We didn’t know better.
It’s horrible to have that in common with the most successful gymnasts in the world.
Then, in 2016, Rachael Denhollander, a former gymnast, and an anonymous gymnastics Olympic medalist filed complaints against Nassar. By 2018, more than 265 victims had been identified, and high-profile stars, including Raisman and Biles, had joined the chorus. The national team stopped training at the Károlyi Ranch, and Nassar was sentenced to a total of 140 to 360 years in prison for all of the charges against him. Ultimately, the independent investigation commissioned by the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee estimated that Nassar had abused more than 400 children and young adults.
Gymnastics’ brutal culture of perfectionism hasn’t totally disappeared. But in the past several years, grown women have started to transform the image of a gymnast from meek little girl to empowered athlete. They’ve proved that they can win medals on their own terms, and many modern coaches have come to recognize that success doesn’t require breaking young girls. If the culture is set by the most successful, then Biles and her coaches, Cécile Canqueteau-Landi and Laurent Landi, are the new models. When Biles pulled out of the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 to protect her mental and physical health, the Landis supported her decision. When she decided to make another run in 2024, the Landis followedher lead. Katie Walsh, the director of the Netflix documentary Simone Rising, calls the relationship between Biles and her coaches “collaborative.” Both coach and gymnast have agency.
Prioritizing athletes’ well-being has made it easier for gymnasts to excel as they get older. In 2022, new management at USAG (the governing body of the sport in the United States) pledged to build up athletes “mentally and emotionally.” Add in advances in sports medicine and smart training practices, and more older gymnasts are physically able to keep competing. Injuries are still inevitable, but they might not be career-ending anymore. You can take the time you need to heal without aging out of the sport before the next Olympic cycle. Those injured at or just before the Olympic trials this year—Skye Blakely, age 19; Kayla DiCello, 20; and Shilese Jones, 22— might make another run in 2028 in Los Angeles. Even the 2012 all-around gold medalist, Gabby Douglas, wants to compete in L.A., at which point she’ll be 32.
The change in culture haspushed more gyms to welcome whole teams of non-elite adult gymnasts searching for community and the kind of joy they can find only upside-down. When the old culture imploded, grown-ups like me returned, determined to redefine our relationship with a sport that we love but that almost destroyed us.
It’s awesome to have that in common with the most successful gymnasts in the world.
After all, the sport itself was never the problem. It certainly comes with risks—annual injuries in gymnastics among children rival those in some contact sports. But it also has benefits. Research has found that it may actually be good for a person, at any age, to invert their body. One gymnast I spoke with, Serina Gelinas, told me that it helps her with sensory-processing issues. A recent study in Indonesia showed that basic gymnastics can lower blood pressure and cholesterol in women older than 65. And the mental fortitude and perseverance needed to convince yourself to even get up on a 10-centimeter-wide beam—let alone flip on one—make “adult” tasks such as public speaking and negotiating a raise seem like pieces of cake.
Tirro, the Geriatric Gymnast, trains with and now also coaches an adult class at Flipper’s Gymnastics in New Jersey. She told me the culture change has even affected women, like her, who didn’t grow up doing gymnastics. Elite “grandma” gymnasts inspire Tirro because their success is evidence that “old” people are capable of more than they might think. Watching them find joy in what they do, potential gymnasts of all ages might decide to try the sport for themselves.
Gina Paulhus’s Facebook group now has more than 13,000 members. She keeps a spreadsheet of gyms that host adult classes or open gym sessions—at least 445 in the United States alone. This year, the U.S. hosted its first Masters Gymnastics World Cup, in which about 200 gymnasts, men and women, ages 30 and up, competed—some traveling from as far away as Germany and Japan. The Reddit space r/gymnastics has even banned posts starting with “Am I too old … ?” The answer, moderators say, is boring because it’s always the same: “No, you’re not too old to start.”
