Starving for the Gold (Summary)

1. (Summary) There’s a saying that men and women should be treated equally but when it came to Laura Robinson this wasn’t the case. Starving for gold is the story about an athlete, Laura Robinson and many other women athletes striving to be the best they can be at the sport. Although Robinson is now a retired athlete, as a women participating in sports she went through physical and sexual abuse. Women were pressured into looking their best rather than being their best. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, women with female coaches were passed on to male coaches. This was only the case if they had experience and true talent. This meant that only males can be good leaders and that women should look up to them. Using weight and body fat as a tool to manipulate athletes is a form of sexual abuse and the coaches were doing just that. In the story, one of the few athletes, who weighed 135 pounds and was 5-foot-5, was convinced by her coach that she needed to lose weight. This made her believe she was fat and it led to starvation. As one of top athletes, due to her starvation diet, her standings suffered greatly; as a result she retired from active competition. Another athlete was made to believe that standings in sports didn’t mean anything and that appearance was most important. The third athlete was convinced that maintaining low body fat composition was most important, more important than the sport itself. They would be treated to drugs such as anabolic steroids. This would change their physical appearance and could have them ill afterwards. According to Marion Lay, manager of the women’s program at Sports Canada, “coaches who manipulate through food and body image, are robbing women of their self esteem and self respect.”   Women had to give up many things in order to enter the sports world. It was as if they were being treated like slaves rather than athletes. They were told to play the game the way the coaches themselves wanted them to play, and look the way they wanted...