Adam Rippon on Quiet Starvation in Men’s Figure Skating
“I looked around and saw my competitors, they’re all doing these quads,
and at the same time they’re a head shorter than me, they’re 10 years younger than me and they’re the size of one of my legs,” Rippon said.
But I still kind of look in the mirror and nitpick everything.”
Kelly Rippon, Adam’s mother, remembers when his first coach, a woman, informed her
that her son, then 10, would never be able to execute advanced jumps because of his “heavy bottom.” The coach suggested that Rippon be steered toward speedskating.
Instead, Boitano said, Rippon pulled back his shoulders, puffed out his chest and proudly proclaimed, “I’ve never been thinner.”
It was 2016, and Rippon was subsisting mostly on a daily diet of three slices of whole
grain bread topped with miserly pats of the spread I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.
But he said that eating disorders and disordered eating “are not discriminatory, they occur in both genders in all sports.”
According to the National Eating Disorders Association, 20 million American women
and 10 million men will at some point struggle with a clinically significant eating disorder.
“If judges tell you to lose weight,” Boitano said, “you don’t have time to figure out how do it healthily.”
The education process for American skaters and their national federation is continuing.