Chalked Up: Inside Elite Gymnastics' Merciless Coaching, Overzealous Parents, Eating Disorders, and Elusive Olympic Dreams
Chalked Up: Inside Elite Gymnastics' Merciless Coaching, Overzealous Parents, Eating Disorders, and Elusive Olympic Dreams book cover

Chalked Up: Inside Elite Gymnastics' Merciless Coaching, Overzealous Parents, Eating Disorders, and Elusive Olympic Dreams

Hardcover – Bargain Price, May 1, 2008

by
Price
$61.00
Format
Hardcover
Pages
304
Publisher
William Morrow
Publication Date
Dimensions
5.5 x 1.04 x 8.25 inches
Weight
15.2 ounces

Description

From Publishers Weekly Sey writes of her career in internationally competitive gymnastics, which culminated when she won the 1986 U.S. national championship at age 17. From the start Sey was an underdog, ever the second-best athlete on the team hoping to prove herself with tenacity and toughness. She endured numerous injuries—including a broken femur, which could have ended her career—as well as an eating disorder, depression, isolation and tremendous strain on her family. With each new sacrifice that her parents and brother made to support her, the stakes crept higher, inuring them all to gymnastics' inherent physical and psychological trauma. After claiming the U.S. title, Sey was shell-shocked and exhausted, suddenly robbed of her lifelong motivation. I'd always been a fighter, a come-from-behind girl. Now that I was on top, the battle would be unwinnable. The memoir's poignant glimpses at Sey's adult struggle to reckon with her past are regrettably sparse, and her prose occasionally lapses into wordiness, but overall, she has written a courageous story befitting a comeback kid—a timely release for the 2008 Olympics. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Sey was the 1986 U.S. national gymnastics champion, but since gymnastics is a sport that only captures the fancy of the general populace during Olympic years, she is relatively unknown outside the sport’s inner circle. Joan Ryan exposed many of female gymnastics’ abuses in her classic Little Girls in Pretty Boxes (1996), but Sey adds to that sad story (her lengthy subtitle conveys much of the substance of her years as an elite gymnast). She acknowledges that her obsessively competitive personality may have simply found a venue in which to flourish, but the demands placed upon her by club coaches and parents surely exacerbated the situation. Sey’s parents moved so she could train with the right coaches, then virtually ignored their younger son and nearly lost their marriage along the way. Through it all, Sey suffered an adolescence of eating disorders, endured numerous broken bones, and viewed every element of her life through the distorting prism of competition. It’s a fascinating and disturbing book and certainly the young year’s front-runner for most literate and painfully honest sports autobiography. --Wes Lukowsky "A cautionary tale to not just athletes, parents, coaches, and judges but to fans of gymnasticsx85 intense, gripping, and powerful." -- Kathryn Bertine, ESPN columnist and author of All the Sundays Yet to Come: A Skater's Journey "A courageous story befitting a comeback kidx97a timely release for the 2008 Olympics." -- Publishers Weekly "A remarkably candid, unblinking portrait of what it truly takes to become a championx85that may forever alter the way you watch sports." -- Jake Tapper, Senior National Correspondent, ABC News "Chalked Up pulls no punchesx85Seyx92s writing is brilliantx85offering perceptive psychoanalysis of everyone in her isolated worldx85Chalked Up is proof that she still has alot of guts." -- International Gymnast "Is the wonder of seeing these tiny bodies propel through space worth the horror they suffer to achieve grace and beauty? Orx97and this is a conclusion the Sey refuses to drawx97is this "sport" just institutionalized, commercialized, child abuse?" -- Penthouse "Sey writes with vivid, clear-eyed candor; she doesnx92t blame others, instead feeling that all the pressure came from withinx85To this day, this former athlete, now a highly successful businesswoman, is haunted by feelings of failure. Young athletes and their parents would appreciate Seyx92s book." -- Library Journal "She has eloquently and fairly exposed a dark side to our sport that parents have long needed to be made aware of." -- Dominique Moceanu, Olympic Gold Medal Winning Gymnast "A cautionary tale to not just athletes, parents, coaches, and judges but to fans of gymnastics. intense, gripping, and powerful." (Kathryn Bertine, ESPN columnist and author of All the Sundays Yet to Come: A Skater's Journey )"She has eloquently and fairly exposed a dark side to our sport that parents have long needed to be made aware of." (Dominique Moceanu, Olympic Gold Medal Winning Gymnast )"CURLING UP WITH A GOOD HEALTH BOOK: In 1986 Sey was the number one gymnast in America. Her memoir recounts what it took to get there. As a former gymnast myself (no where NEAR as accomplished), I relished this unvarnished account of the sport." (Real Simple Magazine (blog), Liz Krieger )"Sey writes with vivid, clear-eyed candor; she doesn't blame others, instead feeling that all the pressure came from within.To this day, this former athlete, now a highly successful businesswoman, is haunted by feelings of failure. Young athletes and their parents would appreciate Sey's book." (Library Journal )"A courageous story befitting a comeback kid-a timely release for the 2008 Olympics." (Publishers Weekly )"Is the wonder of seeing these tiny bodies propel through space worth the horror they suffer to achieve grace and beauty? Or-and this is a conclusion the Sey refuses to draw-is this "sport" just institutionalized, commercialized, child abuse?" (Penthouse )"Sey's memoir has sent shock waves through the tightly knit world of top athletes, sparking controversy.She hopes her book might serve as both a wake-up call to a sport that she says she still loves and a lesson to parents whose children enter the world of top athletics." (The Observer, UK )"A remarkably candid, unblinking portrait of what it truly takes to become a champion.that may forever alter the way you watch sports." (Jake Tapper, Senior National Correspondent, ABC News )"Chalked Up pulls no punches.Sey's writing is brilliant.offering perceptive psychoanalysis of everyone in her isolated world.Chalked Up is proof that she still has alot of guts." (International Gymnast ) The 1986 national gymnastics champion and a seven-time U.S. National team member, Jennifer Sey is a graduate of Stanford University. She lives with her husband and two sons in San Francisco. Read more

Features & Highlights

  • The true story of the 1986 U.S. National Gymnastics champion whose lifelong dream was to compete in the Olympics, until anorexia, injuries, and coaching abuses nearly destroyed her
  • Fanciful dreams of gold medals and Nadia Comaneci led Jennifer Sey to become a gymnast at the age of six. She was a natural at the sport, and her early success propelled her family to sacrifice everything to help her become, by age eleven, one of America’s elite, competing at prestigious events worldwide alongside such future gymnastics’ luminaries as Mary Lou Retton.
  • But as she set her sights higher and higher—the senior national team, the World Championships, the 1988 Olympics—Sey began to change, putting her needs, her health, and her well-being aside in the name of winning. And the adults in her life refused to notice her downward spiral.
  • In
  • Chalked Up
  • Sey reveals the tarnish behind her gold medals. A powerful portrait of intensity and drive, eating disorders and stage parents, abusive coaches and manipulative businessmen, denial and the seduction of success, it is the story of a young girl whose dreams would become eclipsed by the adults around her. As she recounts her experiences, Sey sheds light on the destructiveness of our winning-is-everything culture where underage and underweight girls are celebrated and on the need for balance in children’s lives.

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
60%
(179)
★★★★
25%
(75)
★★★
15%
(45)
★★
7%
(21)
★
-7%
(-21)

Most Helpful Reviews

✓ Verified Purchase

An interesting book

I just finished reading "Little Girls in Pretty Boxes," and "Chalked Up" is written in a similar vein. Both books are withering attacks on the gymnastics industry and its emphasis upon winning at all costs. However, whereas "Little Girls in Pretty Boxes" serves as a call to action, having been written with an eye towards reform, "Chalked Up" is a memoir with no apparent aim other than personal catharsis. It is Jennifer Sey's story of her years as an elite competitor, an experience which left her with ambivalent feelings about the sport and a lasting and "profound sense of inadequacy."

Jennifer Sey was the 1986 U.S. National Gymnastics Champion. To attain that goal, she sacrificed any semblance of a normal adolescence, spending seven hours a day in the gym and alternately starving herself and downing laxatives to keep her body in a state of prepubscence. She had few friends outside the gym. Her friendships with gymnasts "centered on trading weight-loss tips" and were marked by "a cloaked but vicious competitiveness." Sey's family also made sacrifices - too many sacrifices, some might say. Whenever Jennifer advanced in her skills and "moved up" to a new gym, her brother was forced to switch schools and gyms (he too was a gymnast, but perennially in his sister's shadow). When Jennifer became a member of the Parkettes, a prestigious gymnastics squad based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, her mother drove the children two hours each way to the gym, five days a week. After a while, the commute became too onerous, so Jennifer's mother and brother moved to Allentown, leaving Jennifer's father alone in their home in New Jersey. Jennifer's mother took a job working in the front office at the Parkettes' gym and her life came to revolve entirely around her daughter's gymnastics career. Although Jennifer's father ultimately sold their dream home in New Jersey and joined the rest of the family in Allentown ("this godforsaken town"), the years of living a separate life from his wife and children had done their damage; years later, Jennifer found out that he had been having an affair with his office manager. Sey is acutely aware of the heavy toll her years in gymnastics exacted on her family.

Sey was unable to derive any lasting satisfaction from her win at Nationals. As she makes clear in her book, it's the nature of the elite gymnast to always be looking towards the next thing: the next skill to be mastered, the next competition to be won. No sooner had she won Nationals than she began anticipating with dread the training that awaited her in preparation for the 1988 Olympic games. Even on the day of her triumph, there were whispers that she hadn't really deserved it, that she had only won because other competitors fell, that the real victory belonged to the junior champion, Kristie Phillips, who had put in a spectacular performance that day. Having battled serious injuries, an eating disorder, and mental agony to claw her way to the top, she realized that she lacked the desire to continue -- but no one would let her stop. So, she began eating. As Sey writes, "I used my body to assert control over my life...I proclaimed my adulthood by gaining weight." Reaction was immediate and vitriolic: "My mom lost control, threatening imposed starvation. `I won't let you eat! I'll lock the cabinets! You're not going to throw this away after all the time and money we've spent!'" Her coach, Donna Strauss, owner of Parkettes, laid on the guilt: "I can see the fat on you! Can't you see yourself? After all this. All we've done. You're gonna give it all away. You're nothing!" As an aside, one of Mrs. Strauss' favorite mantras was: "I don't coach fat gymnasts!" To inspire her gymnasts to remain emaciated, she would belittle those who had gained weight over the intercom system at the gym: "Hi, everyone! Look at Lisa there on the mat. She gained two pounds today. Lisa, at this rate you'll look like your mother in no time. Is that what you want?" Click. (Lisa's mother, who was morbidly obese, sat in the balcony during this tirade and said nothing.)

I liked this book much better the second time I read it. The first time, I was put off by Sey's personality. She comes across as so critical, so self-absorbed, so shallow and grasping. Also, as she tells the story, her victory at Nationals does seem like a bit of a fluke. She had not been a consistent top-ten competitor prior to that event, hampered by injuries and nerves. However, upon re-reading, Sey becomes a more sympathetic figure. This is an autobiography, after all, and it's written by a person who is filled with "boundless shame" and "a colossal sense of failure." Sey's less-than-flattering depiction of herself reflects the years of being berated by her coaches, of equating self-worth with performance at competitions. Even as an adult, she carries a "self-eradicating, desperate need for recognition with me in everything that I do." She is critical of others because she was trained to view every peer as a potential competitor. She is self-absorbed and grasping because those are the traits it takes to make it to the top. She is shallow because she never knew a world outside of gymnastics until she was twenty years old. Sey goes out of her way to highlight her adolescent selfishness, which may be a form of atonement: it's clear that she harbors bitterness towards her "emotionally neglectful stage parents," especially her mother, but it's equally clear that she feels guilty about having such bitterness. In the end, the portrait of Jennifer Sey that emerges in these pages is poignant, revealing as it does the long-term emotional damage that the world of elite gymnastics can inflict.
28 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

How strong do you think I am?

The book Chalked Up by Jennifer Sey gives the reader a sneak peek into the world of elite gymnastics' merciless coaching, overzealous parents, eating disorders and elusive Olympic dreams. It is a collection of the authors and her gymnast friends' hard memories from when they were top-ranked gymnasts. What is truly impact full of the book is that coaches dream of the Olympics even more than the gymnasts themselves, the better their gymnasts are the more money they are able to get out of them and this isn't just 40 years ago- it is happening today. This is evident when the author states "You're not even trying! What the hell is the matter with you!.. Jesus, Sey! You're throwing it all away. No wonder you can't do anything. You're fat!" Sey's coaches fit perfectly the stereotypical thought of people who are willing to sacrifice their gymnast's life to get some good money out of them; sometimes pushing them so far that they'd risk potentially life-threatening injuries not only from the sport itself, the mal-nutrition they were all suffering from, but from the intense verbal abuse they had to go through daily, being told they weren't good enough, they were never going to make it, being threatened to be kicked out of the gym if they didn't do a skill on time, being told they were as fat as cows; when we all know and their coaches probably did too that they were very thin. On a daily basis, Sey's coaches would try to "sugar coat" everything; from an injury to a weight gain to a skill that that wasn't quite ready for a meet. "I awoke to a full leg cast, hip to toe, and the "good news" was that it was not my knee. The knee injury was death to a gymnast. The fabled anterior cruciate tear, which required endless reparative surgeries was what id feared. Tammy Smith, a former Parkette, had been forced to retire from this injury. I had broken my femur, one of the largest and strongest bones in the human body, nearly in two. The doctor had reset the bone while I was anesthetized, and luckily, there was no internal fixation requited to align and fuse the fracture. It was a supracondylar break, just above the knee joint, which would likely result in knee arthritis later in my life. My coaches, who dome to Montreal to watch the competition and lend support, railed around me "it's not your knee" John cheered. "it's only broken" Mrs. Strauss rejoiced." How could her coaches possibly been so cheery? Were they aware that their top ranked gymnast in the country had broken her femur and would probably never be the same gymnast again? Yes, a femur break is "better" than a knee cartilage tear but it hurts twice as much... It seems as if Sey used this book as a way to tell others about difficulties she experienced while an elite gymnast. People can argue all day long about if Sey's parents should have been more pro-active and less focused upon their child's potential Olympic medal but that is something only the author can have a say on after all, she was the rising star of the sixties. This book teaches us a lesson, when to push yourself and when to stop and ask: How strong do you think I am? How much can I take of this?
4 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

Interesting read

I was a gymnast for most of my life, so this book was pretty interesting to read. I never made it to the elite level, but I can definitely relate to some of the pressures the author mentions throughout the book.

Recommended for those interested in learning more about the pressures of high level competition.
1 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

A powerful, therapeutic and thought provoking read

For me, reading this memoir was therapeutic in that I was able to identify with, and as a result, understand better now, the implications, both positive and negative, that a former gymnast may carry with her throughout her life.
I identify with a perfectionistic personality manifestating itself in a sport where nothing less than perfection is acceptable. Self esteem, body image and self worth evolving and fueled by outside sources such as ribbons, trophies, medals, verbal praise and the need to please vs. learning to love oneself for "who you are."
"Having been the best at something at a very young age, it is inevitable that anything less than number-one status provokes feelings of failure." This statement, along with examples of perceived failure that Jennifer Sey shares about her adult life, made me realize that thoughts and experiences that I had/have as an adult, those that say anything less than "the best" is a failure, are thoughts that others have had too. Although I was not an elite gymnast but a gymnast nevertheless, having read this book I feel that my thoughts and struggles now have validity thus I can work to overcome them. I can heal from feelings of failure because I gave up a career to stay home with my two young children (feeling that I was not giving 100%to either). I can move on from my perceived failure of having 2 C sections vs. drug free vaginal births (because that's the way I "should" have been able to do it). I can reevaluate my perceived weakness as a mother because I could not soothe my colicky infant or didn't feel in control of my spirited child.
I can face my fear of the need to be good/great at something else because I failed at another. I can focus on loving ME for "who I am."
Thank You Jennifer for having the courage for writing this book. Although you have faced criticism, it is evident by the comments, and I am sure many more that have not yet commented, that your courage has touched many lives. This, for you, is a well deserved "win" NOT a failure!
1 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

Are parents blind?

Chalked Up : Inside elite gymnastic's merciless coaching, overzealous parents, eating disorders and elusive Olympic dreams is is a great choice for adults and teens. I found it accidently in the library when my daughter and I were browsing non-fiction books for her summer assignment. Jennifer Sey was the U.S. Gymnastics National Champion in 1986. Her love and passion of and dedication to gymnastics ended shortly after that amazing achievement when at the age of 18 she felt too old, too fat and too tired to compete anymore. She tells of the support of some coaches but of the abuse of others. She tells of the unwavering support of her family, who sacrificed so much to make her daughter's dream come true.
1 people found this helpful
✓ Verified Purchase

Couldn't put it down

As a gymnast in the 80s (but only Class 1!), I was gripped and touched by this story. It was obviously a catharsis for the author, so good for her--it was gripping to the reader as well. I found most of the sport's sacrifices and inconveniences relatively minor, except for one thing: those girls were being literally starved. They weren't fed small but nutritious meals, no; they were encouraged to live on lettuce and Ex-Lax. It's no wonder so many injuries occurred, and I could feel the author's pain when she came back from her fractured leg and when her ankle refused to heal. One star off for lack of overall context of the sport. I would have liked to see more about whether the nutritional practices were ever called into question, or whether coaches were ever sanctioned, and when/how/if things changed. Also a bit more about the Soviets in the 80s--there was such an incredible jump in the skill levels in 87-88. All in all, very well done and, for me at least, un-putdownable.
✓ Verified Purchase

great read!

For anyone who loves or follows gymnastics, this is a must read! truly inspired by the dedication of this author and her strength to share her story! i will see the trials in san jose with a different outlook. thank you jennifer sey!!!

Related Books