Gymnasts have aired their anger at not being heard at an emergency meeting ordered by Canada’s sports minister over the abuse of athletes.
Posted yesterday at 7:49 p.m.
No less than 270 signatories have so far supported an open letter published last Monday.
A group of 70 gymnasts signed an open letter to denounce this reality last Monday. Then, over the past few days, that number more than tripled to 270 during the day on Friday. This exit of the gymnasts comes a month after that of dozens of athletes in bobsleigh and skeleton demanding the departure of the president and acting director of performance of their national federation.
These public outings, which are in addition to many others, forced Minister Pascale St-Onge to call an emergency meeting on Thursday with representatives from various organizations, including the Canadian Olympic Committee and Own the Podium.
But the gymnasts denounce the fact that they have been excluded from the conversation.
Brittany Rogers is now an adult and retired from competition three years ago. However, the harsh words repeated to her throughout her childhood in the practice of her sport continue to haunt her like a skipping record.
You are fat. You’re stupid. You’re not good enough.
“I don’t think I understood the extent of the damage until I retired from the sport,” Rogers said. And I haven’t been able to reflect deeply on the effects that this had on my personality today and the consequences that I continue to suffer before I find myself in retirement. »
Rogers, who represented Canada at the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games, is one of the signatories of the open letter sent to Sport Canada about abuse in sport and particularly in gymnastics.
While situations of abuse are alarming in all sports, physical and psychological abuse in gymnastics involves minors. Then, these young people carry these traumas into their adult life.
New things pop up almost every day. My self-confidence is practically non-existent. I doubt myself. Sometimes I can’t even look at myself in the mirror because I judge my physical appearance harshly or because it’s ingrained in me that I’ll never be good enough.
Brittany Rogers
She says that as a child she had to climb on the scale during each training session and that today she still has to train intensively six days a week for fear of gaining weight. A routine she hates.
“People don’t realize the long-term repercussions of being told you’re fat, stupid, and can’t do anything,” says renowned sports psychologist Penny Werthner.
“When you experience physical, emotional, sexual abuse, it has long-term and often lifelong consequences,” adds the dean of the faculty of kinesiology at the University of Calgary.
Ex-athlete and former Gymnastics Canada board member Kim Shore, who is also a mother of young gymnasts, says there was “frustration” at not having athletes invited to the meeting emergency.
An anger shared by the athletes of sliding sports having also been at the origin of denunciations.
“These are the two groups that we know are mobilized, galvanized and speak out publicly,” explains Shore, who does not understand the minister’s omission.
For her part, the Minister of Sport says that she has accelerated the deployment of an independent mechanism for supervising security in sport within the Center for the Settlement of Sports Disputes of Canada and which will be mandatory for each of the federations. She promises that everything will be in place by the end of spring.
The minister called the situation a “crisis” in sport in Canada, adding that at least eight sports federations have been subject to allegations of abuse since her appointment five months ago.