Paris 2024: Is the Olympics right for child athletes?

Skateboarder Zheng Haohao from China (11), Indian swimmer Dhinidhi Desinghu (14) and two Americans, Hezly Rivera (16) and Quincy Wilson (16), are just some of the young athletes competing at the Olympic Games in Paris. While this has caused excitement around the future of some sports, there are also questions about what effect this level of elite competition has on children.

"Adolescence is a highly volatile period, physically, physiologically, cognitively and psycho-socially. Then you overlay the demands of competitive sports at the world class level and wow, how do you successfully navigate that?" asked Michael Bergeron, who has extensively researched young athletes and works with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on youth athletic development.

"You can't anticipate what's going to happen, and in every child, it doesn't happen in the same way, at the same time, and at the same pace to the same degree."

Bergeron recently led a review on youth development and participation in elite sport, which will be published later this year. The review aims to acknowledge the inherent elements of youth development while also trying to positively impact modifiable ones, such as training intensity and meaningful support systems.

With the global youth sports industry booming, Bergeron and his team want this holistic framework to set the standard for all involved in elite youth sports.

"This consensus isn't a prescription for attaining Olympic medals. It's a framework that would give each youth involved the best opportunity to succeed as a child, as a person and as an athlete," Bergeron told DW.

Physical concerns for youngsters

Unlike the Youth Games, which limits participation to those aged 15 to 18, the Olympics has no age limit governing all 32 sports.

Rather, the governing body of each individual sport decides if there should an age limit, as gymnastics (16) and diving (14) have done.

For those youngsters aiming to or arriving on the big stage, there are a variety of impacts to consider. Physically, adolescent growth spurts happen at different times. Some children will stop growing at 16, others at 21, but a fully developed stature is not the same as skeletal growth.

"We have these things called apophyseal sites," said Sean Cumming, a researcher on growth and maturation in sport at the University of Bath. "So, the apophyses is where the tendons attach to the bone, and when the child is growing, those sites tend to be a little more fragile. If there's an excessive tension placed upon that site, the tendon won't go, it'll be the bone that goes up in flames, and that can cause pain and problems. Those types of sites will not be fully fused, even in an early developer, until maybe the ages of 21, 22 years of age. So, if you are working with young athletes, you really do need to be careful in terms of managing the load that is placed upon them."

Young Olympians also face mental challenge

Rosemary Purcell, a professor at Australia's University of Melbourne who specializes in mental health in elite sports, believes the psychological picture is far from straightforward.

"There are pretty stark differences between what we see in the community and in these elite youth athletes," said Purcell. "Some sports do have a higher rate of eating disorders and body image disturbance in young athletes, but conversely, they may have lower rates of depression and anxiety than we would see in the community."

Purcell, who was a part of the latest IOC review into youth development along with Cumming and Bergeron, grapples with the concept of such young children competing on the Olympic stage. But she also questions the mental health impact of telling young people they couldn't compete because of an age limit. So much comes down to a supportive environment and viewing each person holistically.

To do this requires a mindset shift from crisis management to protection and prevention.

"That means understanding what mentally healthy environments look like. What are the behaviors there? What does coaching and parental influence look like? It needs to move clearly to that prevention and promotion lens," said Purcell.

"The good thing is a lot of it, in my opinion, will come from the bottom up because young people now are so aware, sometimes too aware, of mental health issues. They're going to shift the conversation because they want to also be seen in this more holistic kind of light."

Wrong messages and metrics?

But change will also have to come from the top, as former Olympic silver medalist Cath Bishop pointed out.

"This comes back to the issue of culture, leadership, all of which are quite weak and often not the core of why you're employed in your job as a coach, a performance director, or even as a CEO," said Bishop, now an author and consultant. "We've rewarded coaches or sacked them according to whether they've won medals, not according to how well they've treated children. So your metrics are distorting behavior. We know that's what happens whenever we turn a measure into a metric, behavior is distorted in order to achieve it."

Perhaps the elephant in the room here is the underlying purpose of the Olympics. There is no denying that part of the IOC's decision to bring in new sports is to convince a younger generation that the Olympics is worth their time, but with evolution comes an increased chance of collateral. The aforementioned framework will hopefully go a long way to mitigating such damage.

"So we win a medal, we damage a person. We damage lots of other people along the way. What's the social value of that? It's pretty negative," Bishop told DW. "Over time there's scope to start unpicking a medal. Well, we bought it. We basically paid millions of pounds and we damaged people along the way. Is that making us better?"

If Nike's latest advert is anything to go by, then the answer is undoubtedly yes, it is. The global sports brand antagonizes the viewer by combining clips of young and adult athletes competing with the implied question of whether winning at all costs makes them a bad person.

There is no simple answer to this complex problem. But when we watch children compete at the Games in Paris this summer, a safe and supportive environment that gives them the best chance of flourishing in all areas feels like the very least we should expect from the Olympics.