What’s good for a girl is good for women’s sports

Kyleena Lathram Ski and Snowboard Club Vail: Photo credit Jordana Tergeson

This season women’s ski racing saw remarkable performances on the World Cup. The biggest story, of course, was Mikaela Shiffrin capping her decade of World Cup wins by becoming the winningest skier of all time. We also saw remarkable performances from women across the World Cup age spectrum: from sixteen-year-old Lara Colturi, who scored World Cup points five times in her first year racing FIS; to Zrinka Ljutić, achieving an SL podium days after her 19^th birthday; to 28-year-old Laurence St-Germain who landed on her first ever Big League podium to become World SL Champion; to Paula Moltzan, also age 28, having her best season ever in SL and GS and scoring her first SL podium; to Lara Gut-Behrami, at age 31 winning her first GS since 2017; to 32-year-old Ilka Štuhec, who after three seasons plagued by injury charged back with two wins and two podiums in downhill.

These athletes’ successes underscore women’s potential longevity in ski racing. The average age of the top ten women on the World Cup slalom list is roughly 29. It would seem to make an irrefutable case for the upside of women, like men, sticking with the sport through its highs and lows.

AN UNHEALTHY RUSH TO JUDGEMENT

Despite these realities, sport development systems traditionally put a premium on youth, equating early achievement with long-term potential. This is especially true with women; the accepted notion is that because women develop earlier physically, they must also prove their potential early to be worthy of investment. This is not only unwise but also, and more importantly, unhealthy.

This point is convincingly articulated in “Good for a Girl,” a recently released memoir by track athlete and five-time NCAA champ Lauren Fleshman. In the book, Fleshman combines her athletic experience with the latest research and science to explain why current sports systems fail to capture the potential of female athletes and jeopardize their long-term physical and mental health. Beyond the science, Good for a Girl offers perspective on all the things going on with young girls that affect their participation, health and love of sport—in the short and long term. I wish this book had been around for myself, as well as for my peers and our coaches and parents.

THE FEMALE PERFORMANCE WAVE

Fleshman’s entire story is engaging, but what stopped me in my tracks was Chapter 6: The Female Performance Wave. It is written in the context of her sophomore year in college, where she struggled to perform at her previous level after gaining a developmentally appropriate amount of weight. Fleshman uses her own example to lay out the science behind the inevitable plateau of performance women experience as their bodies transition to womanhood.

This transition coincides with their college years, at age 18-22. At that same age, males are pumped up with testosterone and in the prime of their physical abilities, even if they are still far from their peak performance potential. They still have massive upside to gain with continued technical, tactical, physical and mental development, but exploiting their physical capabilities aligns with their stage of healthy development. Women at this age, however, are at a much more vulnerable stage of development as their bodies invest in changes focused on peak fertility, not peak performance. Their tendons, ligaments, muscles and bones are adjusting to their new strength-to-weight ratio and are likely to experience a plateau or performance dip.

SKI RACING’S PUBERTY RACE

Fleshman explains that this plateau is normal, healthy, and, in fact, “a true rite of passage that should be welcomed because female athletes will never reach their ultimate potential without it.” Instead, she maintains, our sport systems neither acknowledge nor respect it. Female athletes in sports like running or gymnastics race to achieve results before puberty and then battle to stave off physical maturity. Ski racing seems more humane, yet it reverses this race against time. The long-standing development model in ski racing urges women to achieve performance markers at younger ages than men and to keep improving on a linear path. Ultimately, compressing the biological window in which women must perform to prove their talent underserves both early and late developers.

I thought of athletes like St-Germain and Moltzan, and scores like them, who had early success and were then dropped by their respective national teams when they failed to keep pace with expectations. Early developers will inevitably experience performance plateaus, often just when they are expected to break through internationally; meanwhile, late bloomers will never get on the radar, their performance having been eclipsed by the early developers.

Rather than building success, a system based on early talent selection—fueled by the false narrative that long-term success is contingent on early achievement—perpetuates a cycle of panic amidst athletes, parents and coaches. It also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When girls encounter their normal but unwelcome plateaus, many succumb to injury, burnout, financial limits, or simply discouragement, leaving sports before they have a chance to mine their ultimate potential. A new crop replaces them, and the cycle repeats. 

HAVING THE LANGUAGE AND WALKING THE TALK

A plateau can last less than a year, like Fleshman’s did, or two or three years to become, she notes, “a fall from a cliff you never climb back from.” A healthy, communicative environment can make all the difference. Even Fleshman’s best coaches lacked the language to openly address things related to women’s bodies. When she was trying, for the first time in her life, to lose weight, her coach told her, “Just don’t do anything stupid,” code for “Don’t get an eating disorder.” No discussion about how to lose weight safely in a way that would not affect health or performance or of the dangerous long-term health outcomes (bone loss, amenorrhea, decreased pain tolerance, slower recovery, reduced immunity, etc.) that are the trade-off to unhealthy weight loss.

Even though science draws a straight line between women’s performance and menstrual health, it is a rarely discussed topic. In an interview with David Epstein, Fleshman suggests: “Raising consciousness about the female performance wave is a great start. We need to normalize the progression of the trained, developing female body from childlike to softer and fuller, to getting leaner with age.”

This part of Fleshman’s story brought back many memories of myself and my teammates navigating our plateaus with little guidance other than being urged towards leanness, strength and, above all, results. Semi-recovered athletes were applauded for stoicism rather than being advised to rest and fully heal; when a teammate showed up to a training camp 15 pounds lighter than she’d been a month earlier, nobody—neither coaches nor athletes—said a thing; scores of athletes, admonished to lose weight, were subsequently plagued with a succession of mysterious little injuries. Fleshman’s story, backed by research, helped explain why that stage of sport and life felt unmoored and unpredictable. 

THE SOLUTION: KEEP ’EM IN THE GAME

Today, as a coach and spokesperson, Fleshman advocates for creating athletic environments that prioritize empowerment over winning and support holistic athlete development. When she talks to girls and young women, she is surprised that: “Nobody has told them that the record holders and medal winners are grown-ass women, not girls, all of whom had tough years once upon a time; and that their own best years will truly begin in their mid-20s.”

Youth bias will never change until everyone invested in a sport—top to bottom—is also invested in the long-term health of its athletes. That means ignoring the siren song of early results and titles and focusing instead on the greater goal of preserving the physical and emotional health of athletes, as well as their love of the sport.

It’s easy and understandable for athletes to get excited or depressed about where they are or aren’t at the end of a season. We can remind them that true excellence is a long game; if we resist the urge to grasp at every shiny penny of youth achievement, we’ll help them get that much closer to reaching the pot of gold, their ultimate potential.

If you want to learn more about the Female Performance Wave and how to improve the landscape of women’s sports, read Good for a Girl, or listen to Fleshman on a host of podcasts.