ABSTRACT
Christy Henrich was the third-ranking female gymnast in the United States in the early 1990s. Like many elite female athletes, winning an international gold medal was her primary ambition and motivation. Henrich, known as ‘ET’ for ‘extra tough’, typically undertook a daily practice regime that involved two three-hour practice sessions: one that began at 6.30 a.m. and a second that finished at 10 p.m. In between the practice sessions, she took private school lessons with a tutor, as she had decided to leave high school to concentrate on gymnastics and gain a valued place on the US team. In 1988 she came extremely close to becoming a member of the US Olympic team, just missing out by an incredible 0.118 of a point. In 1990, she was still among the top ten US gymnasts and was working towards the 1992 Olympic team trials, when she was forced to withdraw from a competition because she was too weak to compete. As it turned out, she had developed anorexia and bulimia nervosa to the extent that her body was unable to maintain her gymnastic performance, and her aspirations to reach the top became badly affected. The catalyst that set off her eating disorders occurred in 1988, when a judge at an international competition in Budapest told her that she needed to watch her weight. Eventually, she was forced to give up gymnastics because of her eating disorders, which had taken over her life. In 1994, she stated: ‘My life is a horrifying nightmare. It feels like there’s a beast inside of me, like a monster. It feels evil’ (Japan Times, 1994). At the height of her career she weighed 93 pounds (42 kilograms), but once she left gymnastics, her weight often plummeted to 60 pounds (27 kilograms). Tragically, some six years after that comment from the judge in Budapest, she lost her battle with her eating disorders and died from multiple organ failure in 1994, aged 22 (Japan Times, 1994; Ryan, 1996).
