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Talk:Early sports specialization

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Full maturity

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As a question has been raised about whether peak performance in gymnastics usually happens before the athlete matures into an adult body, I want to make the following notes:

  • Full maturity isn't the same as reaching the age of Legal majority. The WHO says that "late adolescence" runs from age 16 to 24. Simone Biles was 24 during the most recent summer Olympics games. The WHO might have considered her an adolescent then.
  • Skeletal maturity, which matters for a number of the chronic overuse injuries mentioned here, is usually achieved around age 17±2 for females and age 20±2 for males, but (a) there are outliers in both directions, and (b) this age is mediated partly by puberty, so if you are a female and in one of the sports notorious for delayed puberty (e.g., gymnastics), then you are going to achieve skeletal maturity on the later side. Therefore it is not unreasonable to assume that most female gymnasts are achieving skeletal maturity at age 19 or even later.
  • "The peak" is not necessarily a single season/year. Some athletes and dancers reach their peak at age 16 and are still going strong at age 20 or later.
  • The statement is about what usually happens. What Simone Biles can do is not the standard for what "usually" happens. Most elite professional female gymnasts have retired by age 24; many of them retire before age 20.

As always, I have followed the sources I have, but if anyone has a source that directly contradicts this (i.e., something stronger than the ages of the winners at a single competition, which could be a one-time coincidence and says nothing about typical peak performance), I'd be happy to see it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:14, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Buidhe, please see the above notes and compare it against your unfounded assumption that age 20 is a fully mature adult body. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:52, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  1. I think you are bringing up a good point here regarding age of physical maturity. If, for the purposes of this article, it's being defined as something other than what most readers might expect, it should be spelled out.
  2. It's not controversial that successful women's gymnastics athletes have been getting older over time. Successful women divers are even older than gymnasts, although it's hard to find information because the sport is less popular; this analysis based on data from the 2012 Olympics found that female divers averaged 23.9 years, close to the median of all sports' average ages.
  3. This issue can be fixed with a simple rephrase that is faithful to the information in your sources. Simply, that at some point, it was the case that most successful gymnasts achieved their greatest success before they reached the age of maturity. Based on the sources that you have cited, it is not verifiable that this is still the case in 2023, so this should not be stated or implied in the article. Obviously, it would be WP:CRYSTAL to assume it would be the case in the future.
(t · c) buidhe 04:32, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
We have multiple, high-quality sources in hand that say early specialization happens in these sports because the peak happens before full adult maturity.
Do you have any sources that directly contradict this? If we went to WP:NORN and said something like "The sources say this, but we think the sources are wrong because readers will believe that adult bodies fully manifest on the birthday that grants them legal majority in their country, and in this one (or two or three) particular competitions, the median age was above the age of legal majority in my country", they're not going to say "Sure, your original analysis trumps multiple medical sources". WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:26, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I went looking specifically for recent sources, and found these:
I haven't found anything more recent than these. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:50, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I have removed a tag asking for an update on whether women gymnasts are at risk for specializing at a young age. I can find no reliable sources saying that either that girls don't specialize in gymnastics from an early age, or that it being a young woman's sport isn't one of the reasons for that early specialization. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:26, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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This article is overloaded with red-linked terms. I strongly suspect that some these terms (e.g. sexual abuse instead of sexual abuse, and ulnar neuritis instead of ulnar neuritis), or key words in them, can be linked to more general articles, and that others have alternative names we already have articles on. I don't think I've seen article so red-linked since the mid-2000s when had a million fewer articles. The bulk of this article looks well-written and well-sourced (as I said when it was in a draft state last month), but this much red-linking is highly unusual. I fixed one (impact sports) by creating a redirect to the more common term.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:00, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Redlinking is unusual partially because well-intentioned editors remove red links. Wikipedia:Nobody reads the directions, and that goes double for Wikipedia:Red link. Editors get used to "most" articles existing, so they are surprised by red links.
IMO we really should have articles on:
The solution to the red links in this case is to start articles, not to provide redirect or link to related articles. None of these will be difficult to find sources for. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:38, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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