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