Starving For The Gold-Coursework Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Starving For The Gold- - Coursework Example to educate people to the problems women athletes face in hopes that with more people being more knowledgeable on the topic, hopefully changes can be made. The basic cause of the problem, as Robinson states it, is that the coaches of female athletes pressure them to be as thin as possible. For instance, Robinson mentions how one female athlete she talked to said that her coach â€Å"held contests to see who could leave the most food uneaten on her plate at training camp† (yr). This obviously is going to have a negative effect on female athletes, especially when considering that females are pressured into being as thin as possible in society as it is. Another practice mentioned is that female athletes will have their body fat calculated and then compared with the other athletes; the idea is to encourage all of the female athletes to be as skinny as possible. Another female athlete, speaking from her experience with athletic amenorrhea, which is the cessation of the menstrual cycle due to extremely low body-fat composition, stated that â€Å"Pressure was always felt to be lean, and considerable emphasis was placed on being beneat h 12 percent body fat composition. It seemed that the primary goal was to maintain a low-body fat composition† (yr). Overall, as opposed to training female athletes to be fit, they are being trained to be as skinny as possible. This encouraging to be overly thin is giving these athletes eating disorders, but this is not the main motivation behind these practices as Robinson states. The main reason that these sort of practices can be gotten away with is because there is a perceived male-domination in sports. When one views the kind of changes that the coaches are encouraging their female athletes to make, Robinson states that it is not difficult to see that they are trying to make their female athletes resemble their male athletes. This practice Robinson traces back to the 70’s, and in particular the athlete Olga Korbet, as the