| GAGE Center | |
| Full Name: | Great American Gymnastics Center |
| Nicknames: | GAGE |
| Sport: | Artistic gymnastics |
| City: | Blue Springs, Missouri |
| Coach: | Al Fong, Armine Barutyan |
| Members: | Madison Desch, Brenna Dowell, Sabrina Vega, Courtney McCool, Terin Humphrey, Katelyn Ohashi, Christy Henrich, Julissa Gomez, Ivana Hong, Sarah Finnegan, Kara Eaker, Aleah Finnegan, Leanne Wong |
Great American Gymnastics Express, known also as GAGE Center or GAGE, is an American artistic gymnastics academy, located in Blue Springs, Missouri.
GAGE was founded in 1979 by its present-day owner and head coach, Al Fong.[1]
Among the gymnasts who trained at GAGE are:
The deaths of GAGE gymnasts in 1988 and 1994 drew controversy.
In May 1988, Julissa Gomez broke her neck while warming up for vault at a competition in Japan. Observers had noticed her struggle with the apparatus over the months leading up to the competition, including her former coach Béla Károlyi, past and present teammates, and even her own coach, Al Fong. Gomez's technique on the extremely difficult Yurchenko vault had been described as shaky at best, and Gomez was unable to perform the vault with consistency during practices, sometimes missing her feet on the springboard.[2] A teammate from Károlyi's, Chelle Stack, later said, "You could tell it was not a safe vault for her to be doing. Someone along the way should have stopped her." However, Gomez's coaches insisted that she needed to continue training and competing the Yurchenko vault in order to achieve high scores. Gomez fell into a coma during treatment due to a hospital error and never awoke. She died in 1991.
In 1994, Christy Henrich died from anorexia nervosa. Her condition was allegedly spurred by comments from international judges and her coaches. Desperate to move up the ranks in the highly competitive world of Olympic-level gymnastics, Henrich took the criticisms to heart; her drive to lose a few pounds progressed to unhealthy eating habits and, eventually, became full-blown anorexia nervosa.[3] [4] She weighed 47 pounds when she died. Her death led to changes in the way coaches across the nation implement nutrition in training, and how television and media discuss gymnasts' bodies.[5]