Female Skaters: Average Height and Weight?

[Mathematician]

I'm totally morbidly obese and lost 27 lbs in 2 weeks and my doctor was not happy. Now I've lost 68.

68lbs lost is amazing! Well done!

27 in 2 weeks is a lot but its still way healthier than not doing anything at all, thats for sure. Also big progress at the start is a huge motivator. I think its a net positive. I do not think its particularly unhealthy, TBH. Keep it up!

 

[Query]

Of course not all skaters are elites. I've known plenty of recreational skaters, and even some coaches, who could be considered somewhat obese. And a 5' tall 120 pound female is in the normal, healthy range by typical medical standards.

As to whether weight loss surgery could be unfair: Imagine someone who removed organs that were athletically unnecessary for a particular sport, to save a little bit of weight. I would hope that would be banned for the sake of the long term health and happiness of the athlete.

E.g., you don't need to be able to have kids to be an athlete. But relatively few young athletes would be willing to lose that option, so I think it would be an unfair advantage for those who were. Also, I could imagine am evil coach pushing someone to do that, on an athlete who was too young to full evaluate whether it was worth it, and would likely regret it later. I would hope that the rules are written or interpreted to discourage that.

Likewise, skating is one of those sports where many young ladies perform better before they have "come of age", because of changes in body shape and weight. (Other examples: swimming, gymnastics, some types of performance dance.) (I don't know if there are any sports where males are encouraged to do that, though I remember reading about sports like boxing and wrestling where people of different weight ranges are placed in different "classes" - and some athletes try hard, and do unhealthy things, to be at the top end of one of the ranges, including more or less starvation diets just before a bout.) You could even theoretically remove the organs that generate the appropriate hormones that lead to maturity. Again, most young athletes would either be unwilling to do that, or would likely regret it later. It's bad enough that some are encouraged to deliberately malnourish themselves to delay maturity. I've wondered what the long-term consequences of that are. But I hope the rules or interpretations discourage it.

Anyway, this is drifting off topic. I would hope that most young athletes, perhaps including the o.p., wouldn't be pushed too hard to reach an "ideal weight" for their sport. Because there are likely bad side effects. But I realize that many "elite" athletes are pushed to do that.

 

[Mathematician]

Of course not all skaters are elites. I've known plenty of recreational skaters, and even some coaches, who could be considered somewhat obese. And a 5' tall 120 pound female is in the normal, healthy range by typical medical standards.

As to whether weight loss surgery could be unfair: Imagine someone who removed organs that were athletically unnecessary for a particular sport, to save a little bit of weight. I would hope that would be banned for the sake of the long term health and happiness of the athlete.

E.g., you don't need to be able to have kids to be an athlete. But relatively few young athletes would be willing to lose that option, so I think it would be an unfair advantage for those who were. Also, I could imagine am evil coach pushing someone to do that, on an athlete who was too young to full evaluate whether it was worth it, and would likely regret it later. I would hope that the rules are written or interpreted to discourage that.

Likewise, skating is one of those sports where many young ladies perform better before they have "come of age", because of changes in body shape and weight. (Other examples: swimming, gymnastics, some types of performance dance.) (I don't know if there are any sports where males are encouraged to do that, though I remember reading about sports like boxing and wrestling where people of different weight ranges are placed in different "classes" - and some athletes try hard, and do unhealthy things, to be at the top end of one of the ranges, including more or less starvation diets just before a bout.) You could even theoretically remove the organs that generate the appropriate hormones that lead to maturity. Again, most young athletes would either be unwilling to do that, or would likely regret it later. It's bad enough that some are encouraged to deliberately malnourish themselves to delay maturity. I've wondered what the long-term consequences of that are. But I hope the rules or interpretations discourage it.

Anyway, this is drifting off topic. I would hope that most young athletes, perhaps including the o.p., wouldn't be pushed too hard to reach an "ideal weight" for their sport. Because there are likely bad side effects. But I realize that many "elite" athletes are pushed to do that.

I am pretty sure its already illegal or generally bureaucratically impossible to get an organ removed just because you want to. I must say, I have never seen anyone bring up this topic before. You are a unique type of thinker thats for sure...

 

[tstop4me]

You are a unique type of thinker thats for sure...

You win the GS Forum award for most diplomatic, most understated, most restrained characterization.

 

[Query]

I decided to remove most of my response, because it might offend people.

But prophylactic surgeries are often intended to prevent injuries, or enhance performance. Just search Google scholar for "prophylactic surgery" "sports performance". Some of them are controversial.

Some of them involve organ removal.

There is an ancient Greek legend of Amazonian women who removed an upper body organ so they could shoot arrows better. AFAIK, there is no evidence that was actually done. But surgical removal athletic enhancement surgery is obviously not a new idea.

I had elective eye surgery (Lasik + PRK) to enhance sports performance. In my case, I was afraid that my near-sightedness could cause me to die if I lost my glasses while whitewater boating. PRK includes removal of the outer layer of the eye (epithelium). PRK is less common now, but I think is still sometimes used. The surgery eventually enhanced my vision, and provided other advantages, including enhanced sports performance. Corrective vision surgery is NOT banned in figure skating, though there are substantial risks.

Anyway, I know this is way off-topic.

 

[tstop4me]

I had elective eye surgery (Lasik + PRK) to enhance sports performance. In my case, I was afraid that my near-sightedness could cause me to die if I lost my glasses while whitewater boating. PRK includes removal of the outer layer of the eye (epithelium). PRK is less common now, but I think is still sometimes used. The surgery eventually enhanced my vision, and provided other advantages, including enhanced sports performance. Corrective vision surgery is NOT banned in figure skating, though there are substantial risks.

Conflating corrective eye surgery with surgical removal of 15 lbs of body parts for rapid weight loss is ... absurd. You should apply for a job with the White House Press Corp Secretary. Whenever they are backed into an untenable position, they shift the narrative by sowing confusion and creating distraction. [ETA: I corrected a mistake in my original post.]

 

[Mathematician]

You should apply for a job with the White House Press Corp.

You win the GS Forum award for most diplomatic, most understated, most restrained characterization.

 

[Query]

For Paralympic sports, you can find medical journal articles discussing the amputation of non-functional body parts for athletic performance improvement, which in some cases could lead to weight loss among other things. Imagine the consequences if future medical advances would have allowed those body parts to become functional.

That's pretty extreme too.

There are also discussions in such journals of other surgeries that were experimented with in an Eastern European nation, for athletic performance enhancement, that almost anyone would consider child abuse. I hate what sometimes happens when national governments get too involved in sports, for the point of maximizing national pride.

Gee, there has been a lot of turnover in White House secretary positions in recent times. Maybe there is an opening, or will be soon? It could be a lot of fun, while the job lasted! But what if I didn't always agree with the powers that be?

 

[tstop4me]

But what if I didn't always agree with the powers that be?

That's an easy one. They'd simply kick all your body parts out of there ... though the state of those body parts (in particular, whether they remain intact) is an open question.

 

[Query]

Oh. That might be a problem. I often disagree with other people about things. And in the political arena, some people play hardball.

Gee, maybe not so much fun.

I was thinking about that Paralympic case again. Imagine if you had such surgeries, and the people who regulate fairness in sports banned them afterwards. I suppose that already sometimes occurs for newly banned substances and might occur for gender re-assignment issues in all sports (e.g., if the currently required hormone therapies and perhaps surgeries for the latter were to be banned in the future - as they already have been in some locations).

For that matter, and this might be much more relevant to the o.p.'s questions:

there seem to be some WADA rules designed to prevent starvation diets and excessive water loss, though that must sometimes be difficult to detect or even define. I find a WADA rule that sometimes prohibit diuretics, which could create a water loss, and another section that sometimes prohibits enemas & laxatives which could help create a starvation diet, or rough equivalent. I can easily imagine a new rule causing an athlete who used previously unregulated treatments in the past causing that athlete to be disqualified. I don't know all the rules, or when medical exceptions might be granted. I see that some of the medications I am prescribed to take, or might be prescribed to take in the future, for various medical conditions, are banned if one doesn't obtain a "therapeutic use exception" first. I don't even have a record of all the medications I was given prior to surgeries.

If a person who isn't currently testing or competing is currently using one of the WADA banned substances or methods, were to begin to test or compete, how do they regulate past use? Obviously you wouldn't have obtained a therapeutic use exception if you didn't used to test or compete in a sports organization that WADA regulates. Some of the substances they ban are common and have essential and routine medical use. I wonder if some of them are present to some extent in normal food sources.

This is maybe the sort of question that the o.p. should consider, if she intends to control growth rate or weight for sports purposes.

 

[Mathematician]

I can easily imagine a new rule causing an athlete who used previously unregulated treatments in the past causing that athlete to be disqualified.

How? You can not get banned for using something that isn't banned... If you were using it while it was unregulated you cannot get retroactively banned if it is regulated by new rules at a later time. Thats preposterous.

 

[Query]

How? You can not get banned for using something that isn't banned... If you were using it while it was unregulated you cannot get retroactively banned if it is regulated by new rules at a later time. Thats preposterous.

But what if a substance or its chemical byproducts remains in your system? Would tests always be able to reveal they were administered before the new rules became active?

And if it were possible for surgery to create an unfair advantage, and that surgery had long term consequences, couldn't that apply to the athlete's ability to compete after the new rule took effect?

I don't know whether the following Wikipedia article is correct
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Pistorius
but if it is, the IAFF temporally revoked Oscar_Pistorius's ability to compete with specific prosthetic limbs that they thought gave him an unfair advantage over non-disabled athletes. That is somewhat close to that.

Likewise
https://www.sports.legal/2020/11/3708/
appears to be another example of something similar in which Blake Leeper's prosthetic limbs were banned.

I guess that didn't completely ban them - they could have used other prosthetic limbs. But suppose something were surgically implanted - e.g., some type of synthetic muscles, that was initially allowed, but later banned?

There have been some athletic "enhancement surgeries" that might create advantage, now or in the future, discussed at
https://www.gymnica.upol.cz/pdfs/gym/2006/02/06.pdf
Obviously that is an outdated article. But it is easy to imagine the athletes that have had enhancement surgeries being banned in future, even if they aren't at the time of the surgery.

Corrective vision surgery is one such possible case - sometimes it creates vision that is better than the average person has. While this is no longer true, my own vision after Lasik+PRK was better in one eye (or with both eyes together), after surgery - though, if I recall correctly, I had to wear glasses to get the improved vision, because the surgery was somewhat imperfect - I think it was 20/15 or 20/10. I didn't compete, but there are cases of athletes who did and do compete after such surgery. In those sports where enhanced vision is an advantage (which I don't think includes figure skating, though it likely includes hockey, golf, archery and marksmanship, because being able to see subtle details at a distance is important for them; for the specific case of hockey, and perhaps other team sports which occur over an extended area, an enhanced field of view is also said to be an advantage), it is easy to imagine that being a specific case in which it could occur that athletes become banned because of surgery before the rules are established. (Note: immediately after surgery, it is much more common for patients to have problems with their vision, until their eyes heal. That was true for me too, in some respects for about a year. Definitely don't expect to drive home from vision surgery.)

I'm not certain that a brain implant could enhance mental acuity, such as memory, beyond normal human standards. But if it could - and such technologies are being worked on quite a bit, I could imagine the early adopters being banned after rules were established against that. My memory is imperfect, and I have a family history of Alzheimer's; I could easily imagine desiring that regardless of athletics. Memory could affect an athlete's ability to remember a figure skating program. It could also affect athletic auditions - e.g., I am aware of a case where the ability to remember a movement sequence was one of the criteria used to select members of a synchronized skating team. Which makes some sense, because large skating teams like that sometimes have to deal with competition day program changes, because one of the members is injured or is unable to get there. I also once watched a choreographer work with a group of skaters in a learn-to-skate program, who were preparing for a show. She casually assumed all the kids could remember a perhaps 5 or 10 move sequence she only performed for them once. That wasn't even competitive - perhaps she simply didn't realize some of the kids couldn't do that. (Not too surprising for a choreographer - performance dancers are expected to memorize much longer sequences with little lead time, and they too sometimes have to deal with performance day changes that occur when someone is injured or doesn't show up. But I didn't think she should have made that assumption with ordinary kids in a LTS program.) Even in ordinary team sports, team members are often expected to memorize somewhat complex "plays". I assume that is difficult for some of them.