When the Olympics arrive and I hear the familiar kettle drums of the Games’ fanfare music I’m always catapulted back to 1972, when the Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut dazzled the world on the uneven parallel bars. As a kid, I watched transfixed. For the rest of the summer and to the great irritation of my parents and older siblingsk28 casino, I usurped the living room to practice my handstands, cartwheels and round-offs, all while fantasizing about the feel of a gold medal hanging from my neck. Demonstrations of astonishing athleticism will have that effect on children.
It’s for precisely that reason — the unique power of the Olympics to captivate the imaginations of the young and inspire excesses in adults — that we should feel queasy about an 11-year-old skateboarder from China competing in the Paris Games.
She’s not an aberration: Some of the medalists in skateboarding in the 2021 Tokyo Games were 12 and 13, and other competitors this year are as young as 14. These children have inarguably earned their spot at the Olympics. But watching preteens and teens contend on a global stage warps our expectations of children’s athletics and distorts our thinking about the place of sports in all children’s lives.
Almost a century ago, this country radically rethought the relationship of children and labor, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 imposed minimum age requirements for work and limited the number of hours that some children could be employed. We should do the same with sports, starting with instituting a universal minimum age for competing in the Olympic Games and other international championships.
We need a model for youth sports that isn’t hellbent on producing Olympians and that abolishes the early sorting of child athletes based on perceived ability. What’s best for kids — including that tiny subset who might grow up to become Olympians — is lots of outdoor free play, exposure to a variety of athletic options and an approach to youth athletics that promotes widespread participation and sparks engagement and joy.
The International Olympic Committee imposes no limits on competitors’ ages, leaving that decision to the international federations that govern each sport, so standards vary. In track and field, World Athletics requires competitors to be at least 16, while its counterpart in swimming, World Aquatics, sets the age at 14. The upshot? Who competes in Paris this summer is determined by a jumble of rules dictated by international and national governing bodies.
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