As a rhythmic gymnastics junior Olympian, I can confidently say that gymnastics is celebrated as a sport of precision and athletic artistry. Yet when you look past the beautiful leotards and the wonderful routines, you’ll find a culture where language subtly shapes body standards and determines how athletes view themselves. When coaches use seemingly technical terms like “aesthetic clarity” and “tighten up,” it is a form of language weaponization.
I often heard those cues, while standing still on the carpet before the music started, with ribbon coiled at my feet, already conscious of my body before I moved. “Thin” never needed to be said explicitly for the expectation to register.
These words have a tangible impact. One-third of elite rhythmic gymnasts in a study scored 20 or higher on the Eating Attitudes Test-26, signaling serious risk for eating disorders, while 10 percent reached scores indicating highly disordered eating on the Bulimic Investigatory Test Edinburgh symptom subscale. This illustrates shockingly dangerous disordered eating behaviors that threaten gymnasts’ health.
Many researchers have examined how media images and pressures in gymnastics contribute to gymnasts’ body image struggles. However, I believe that, unjustly, little to no attention has been paid to the evaluative language coaches use to describe gymnasts’ body shapes, postures and appearances as tools to create these hierarchies of value. This cannot continue to be the case.
If scholars who treat body dissatisfaction, shame or judging biases as individual problems continue to do so, they risk reinforcing the crucial role that coaches’ language plays in reinforcing these self-conceptions. For instance, Lucibello et al. distinguish between present and anticipatory weight-related shame, treating shame as an individual psychological phenomenon that arises when individuals perceive a gap between their bodies and societal standards. But looking at mental health more broadly shows why this focus on the individual can be harmful. In studies on workplace stress and burnout, researchers note that treating struggles as merely a personal problem diverts attention from organizational systemic causes.
Even more damaging, Di Cagno et al. position coaches as peripheral observers, suggesting that disordered eating in rhythmic gymnasts arises independently of coaching pressure and that coaches merely respond to “symptomatic gymnasts.” As a result, a coach’s active role in entrenching harmful behaviors among gymnasts is overlooked.
Ultimately, there is a broader scholarly tendency to attribute gymnasts’ negative self-conceptions primarily to self-developed beliefs and physical traits. This type of scholarship tremendously overlooks the social and linguistic processes that actually shape and reinforce gymnasts’ negative self-perceptions.
There are three main ways that linguistic weaponization is employed in gymnastics.
First, in gymnastics, there is a systemic reinforcement of subjective norms like body shape, posture and leanness as “objective” performance metrics. Case in point, de Oliveira et al. demonstrate through direct quotes from gymnasts that body dissatisfaction is often a result of the language and messages used by coaches to comment on weight, fat and body shape, which, in turn, propagate this “ideal” physique that gymnasts then believe boosts both movement quality and their scores.
As one athlete explains, “it has a lot to do with [the coaches’] impression, what they see, what they say about us being chubby. And also in relation to the other girls who are thin.” Her words suggest that gymnasts’ intense urge to compare is not innate or self-generated, but socially imposed. Another testimony exposes the dehumanizing rigidity of these expectations, with another gymnast saying “They just decide by looking at you: ‘you will lose such and such weight.’” A final comment is particularly striking — “She [the coach] says that we are fat, but we don’t think we’re so fat.” This commentary leads gymnasts to spiral into dangerous coping behaviors, like laxatives, starvation and overtraining.
Second, coaches exploit the subjectivity of judging to justify appearance-based ideals. More specifically, Díaz-Pereira et al. emphasize that judges’ decisions can be influenced by a range of mental and emotional factors, such as expectations and emotional state, which can introduce inconsistency and bias into scoring. This can lead to leaner gymnasts receiving higher scores than their slightly heavier peers. Coaches then tend to point to judges’ patterned, unfair evaluations that codify certain body types as superior, thereby normalizing pernicious ideals.
Third, euphemistic framing reinforces harmful standards. Terms like “emotional toughness” and “resilience” are rhetorically used to mask abusive verbal behaviors. Coaches shift the cognitive burden onto athletes, making impressionable athletes question their own perceptions of abuse and accept harmful behavior as a standard of excellence.
Gymnasts currently participating in the sport admit that coaches are the central agents in fostering their body dissatisfaction. Gymnasts express, “I think that I feel even fatter when I am weighed … I’d cry … It was a lot of pressure … [The coaches] were already angry because I had to lose weight” and “To be able to achieve the body of a girl who will go to a world championship, who will go to the Pan American Games, those things.”
If linguistic weaponization continues to dictate which bodies, behaviors and ideas are deemed acceptable in gymnastics, there is little to stop this behavior from seeping into other fields, including education, where “standardized achievement” can be used to discipline students’ creativity rather than inspire it. Similarly, it could affect workplaces, where employees’ worth is determined by performative metrics rather than actual contribution.
Ultimately, scholarship must shift from the reactive cataloging of individual shame toward a deliberate interrogation of the social rhetoric that produces and exposes these patterns, instead of framing them as individual failings, so that gymnasts can call out the linguistic scripts for what they are and refuse to lead to their dissemination. Otherwise, how many generations will internalize control as self-discipline before we recognize it as structural harm and certainly before it becomes too ingrained to dismantle?
Michelle Belakh is a freshman double-majoring in linguistics and political science.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.