Any former gymnasts or parents of gymnasts our there?

[PurpleRiverIsland]

news.sky.com/story/british-gymnastics-claims-athletes-beaten-into-submission-amid-culture-of-fear-12022525

I witnessed and was victim of a lot of physical and emotional abuse when I was an elite gymnast at 3 different clubs and from 4 different coaches. I know some of the clubs these girls (speaking out in the media) went to and I’m not surprised at all about the allegations.

I’m wondering how prolific it was. What were your experiences of the sport?

YABU - I was/am involved in gymnastics and have never seen anything untoward

YANBU - I was/am involved in gymnastics and I witnessed physical or emotional abuse.

Please comment too if you would like to share your experiences.

@PurpleRiverIsland no there are no over 18s still training but some have stayed on to move into coaching in the same clubs. Competitively it seems that unless they reach top elite by 18 there are very few opportunities to compete. There are adult classes in our region but I'm not sure how well they are attended.

I've found this chilling reading. If this sort of thing was going on in children's homes and it was known about, they'd be closed down.

Horrific stuff.

@Mumoftwoyoungkids exactly. My DD loved the sport and loved the coaches and hated the sport and coaches in a bad day but would never stop. I would have thrown a huge party when she gave up if I was mentally able. This is how bad it was. The day she left the first gym, after an incident with another girl, the coaches had been shouting at her berating her and basically said she had to think about her future and as we left she said thank you. The respect was so ingrained that no matter what they did she thought they were right

@crunchymum because she loves it and she smiles. When you have watched a child be nervous for comps for years and never look confident about anything and then see that same girl looking at the audience from a stage with a real smile for the first time it is amazing. She dances and she smiles and I cry because I know she is where she is meant to be. In a school where she is encouraged (to dance or rest which ever is appropriate) with an adult that tells her she is talented and can be anything she wants to be. I don't have anything against sport and being competitive and trying hard and achieving, I don't have a problem with gymnastics, I was a gymnast, I come from a family of gymnasts, Olympic ones actually, I have a problem with abusive people

I think what some of us are struggling with @andannabegins is that she was a child and you were the parent. Children love lots of things, including unhealthy or damaging things, and it’s the parents’ job to protect them and put boundaries in place. Your lack of agency in this is confounding! x

I think it is very unfair to blame the parents for driving their girls to training and calling them enablers.

We all know how difficult it is to ask a toddler to wear a coat when they dont want to; to eat wheb they dont like it and to sleep when they are clearly exhausted.
We all know how hard it is to ask a child with eating disorder to eat, a teenager to get up and study or to engage in sports or family life even though we know it IS better for them because we know better.

So we can all agree how difficult it must have been for the parents of those girls who could see what was going on, that it was not good for their kids mental wellbeing and yet they refused to stop. We can all agree.

I think we shouldnt blame the parents. I think we should educate each other and listen very carefully to the victims/survivors so things will change through their voices and horrific experiences.

I am terrified of my own failures. What if something was to happen and I didnt trust my daughter because this coach/doctor was reputable, nice, well liked and well tespected in the community???

I am reading this thread having watched the Epstein documentary. I cannot bring myself to watch Athlete A and the one from HBO In The Heart Of Gold. I will but I cant now.

I am disgusted at the institutionalised bad treatment of the girls accross all boards: gym, swim, dance etc. It is reassuring to see that some clubs were doing things differently. But having done a lot of research and a lot of reading these past few days it looks like that at this level of competing the bad treatment was institutionalised. And I am sure it is everywhere not just in USA or UK.

I was a ballet dancer, not a good one but I dreamt of going to the Ballet School at the Opera. I remember practicing my split and the ballet teacher pushing gently on my shoulder. I didnt suffer and I stopped shortly after to go into horse riding very seriously but I can only imagine the training you must endure to dance or compete at this level.

Then you add the sexual abuse.

Apologies for a longer post than I intended. I am on awe of the courage of the women who have posted today to share their ordeal, the parents of daughters and of the women in those documentaries.
I wanted to say that i believe every word you said and I wish there was something I could do.

I work in a sports injury clinic. Child (early teens) was brought by parent to have an injured ankle assessed, it had been hurt during training the previous day. Very promising gymnast, competing at international level. She was limping and obviously in a lot of discomfort. I did gym and trampolining as a child/teen (only local level and my coaches were brilliant) and I know these girls are hard as nails, so I knew it must be very painful. The therapist diagnosed an injury that would get worse before it got better, and recommended two weeks on crutches. Child was immediately terrified and refused point blank. Her mum explained she would be withdrawn from all competition and would have to train with the toddlers if she missed more than one session in a row. I would have stopped her going, but I wasn't her mum. Bullied, shamed, abused. Sports Therapist said she'll have irreversible injuries by the time she's thirty.

@andannabegins

Sounds like you were as indoctrinated and bullied as your poor DD? I cannot see any other reason the parent would let this happen? You talk about your DD sadness and her mistreatment and now her injuries when you could have put a stop to it years ago?

I appreciate she may want to dance, but when I was 15 I wanted to smoke weed. Guess what my parents said about that????

@Bubblesgun

You do indeed have to pick your battles with children.

Mine would be whipped out of anything causing them aviodable emotional and / or physical pain, as soon as I became aware of it. I'd deal with ther repercussions.

I imagine it is quite easy for parents to get caught up in it too and worried about being seen to deny opportunities. I have to say though, I knew I would say no if my daughter was offered a squad. It’s well publicised how many hours they are doing from such a young age. One of the issues seems to be the all or nothingess. Too many poster have said it was do x or give up a place, do x or be back with the toddlers. Why are there not more intermediate pathways for girls that want to compete and train reasonably hard but for it to not take over their lives? Why do 8 year olds need to be doing 25 hours when so few will ultimately make the true elite levels?

stunned by this thread. I thought this kind of thing stopped when the Soviet Union came apart.

and it sounds like it is still in the 60s when it comes to how girls and boys are treated. Awful.

I know this isn’t directly related but I have been appalled at the images that have been coming up on my Instagram feed recently. I had been looking at some general yoga/Pilates/stretching accounts and became fascinated by how supple some people are. This led to me being shown lots of accounts of incredibly flexible children (mainly girls) being put through horrific stretches like some described on here. Very young children with adults pressing down on their legs and backs. Often seemed to be related to acrobatic-type gymnastics with balls and hoops so the girls are in sparkly leotards with fake tans and make up.

The worst offenders seem to be from Russian accounts and also Chinese. Am I right in thinking that you can’t do this to young bodies without causing lasting damage or damage in the future?

I just wish my DD could be taught to do a decent cartwheel or handstand in gym but either you get on the ultra competitive 20 hours a week treadmill or end up with completely dull PE lessons that barely get you breaking a sweat. So many of DD’s friends that were good gymnasts in primary have abandoned it in secondary (too old?) or joined cheerleader squads with, again, so much emphasis on appearance. Seems a poor way of encouraging fitness and body confidence in young girls.

The tales of abuse on this thread are disgusting. I’m glad my DD didn’t get into gymnastics.

If this sort of thing was going on in children's homes and it was known about, they'd be closed down.

Did the exposure of this and worse happening in children's homes for decades, it being common knowledge and ignored, all pass you by in the news cycle or are you being sarcastic?

I think it is very unfair to blame the parents for driving their girls to training and calling them enablers.

What are parents being ‘blamed’ for? Several posters have complained that they didn’t like the behaviour of coaches in the gyms their daughters trained at, or didn’t approve of the time commitment being asked of very young children.

The answer is simple. Stop sending your daughter to that gym, or that coach. As other posters have pointed out, you are the adult and the parent.

If you ask a coach to make your daughter into a gymnastics champion, that is what he or she will do. Using the harsh methods that have been proven to work in Eastern Europe, and which were adopted by the US gymnastics federation in the 1980s. Would I allow a daughter of mine to train like that, and to live by a regime like that? Not on your life! No matter how talented she was, or how much she wanted to be the next Simone Biles. But realise that all of those smiling, petite girls doing terrifying vaults and dismounts have lived that life with the full collusion of their parents, and nine times out of ten it won’t end well.

I don’t like the hours very young children HAVE to do in order to hit the BG pathway to national competition levels. It feels wrong.

So my one goes to a gym that doesn’t offer those classes. The coaching isn’t as good as she’d get in a “competitive gym”, she doesn’t progress as fast as she could if she did 15 hrs rather than 4 hrs. She will never catch up with the kids who train long and hard in order to pass the annual BG compulsory tests, and as such will never qualify for the British Chanpionships, even if she suddenly develops Simone Biles level of talent. In effect, I wrote off her gymnastics “future” when she was... 6 years old. That in itself is properly insane, and clearly gymnastics in the UK is all sorts of wrong just on that alone.

@ Saz12

That in itself is properly insane, and clearly gymnastics in the UK is all sorts of wrong just on that alone.

I completely agree with you

@Saz12 I agree with you too!

My DD was in an elite squad from an early age, she loved it. Seemed to thrive on the 18+ training a week. The mums (always the mums not dads) were mostly vile creatures, think of the dance moms programme. Could never hide their glee when a gymnast got dropped from a squad.

You were never allowed to watch training, I accidentally went into the gym thinking the session had finished and saw a coach berating my daughter. I was livid, gave him a mouthful and stormed off. Never to go back. My daughter was distraught, it was like she had been brainwashed!

I honesty didn't realise how bad it had become.

Anyway she joined Cheer almost immediately and absolutely loves it! I'd recommend cheerleading for any young athlete.

My DD does figure skating but only recreationally as we don't have the time or vast amount of money to do competitive. Haven't seen anything dodgy from the coaches but it seems from here, a lot of the abuse is mental so you wouldn't always know. Seen parents screaming at their kids, that's common. My dds coach is ok but has the typical stand offish personality of ice skating coaches.

I begged her to leave. I begged the coaches to help when she was injured and that made it worse.

There is a thread on here at the moment where the OP has been told unanimously to go retrieve their child from a situation where the OP's spider senses are tingling.

And yet parents on this thread (not all, and some have ceased the training immediately) are continuing to take their emotionally and physically vulnerable dc into an environment where the parents KNOW they are suffering.

'I begged her to leave' - stop taking her! Stop driving her to the gym several times a week! Stop paying for someone to abuse your child, and instead invest in therapy to support your child's release from this situation.

'I begged the coaches to help when she was injured' - she was injured WHILST IN THEIR CARE, do you honestly think they're going to care about helping her after the event?

Kids want to do stuff we think they shouldn't all the time. But as parents we make sure they're safe - make them wear the cycle helmet, cut back the junk food and encourage them with healthy food, take them to the dentist If they have toothache to get it fixed.

I am absolutely not blaming parents for the abuse. As is written on the other thread, abusers groom not just their victims but their families and communities too. But if you know something isn't right with your child, and this pp shows quite clearly that there was something VERY VERY wrong at her daughter's club, you must do what you can to support them.

I have no personal experience but I have friends who were gymnasts and they say it has completely destroyed their bodies one is going to suffer from lifelong back problems and the other needed a knee replacement at age 20.

What is being described here is simple abuse. It is absolutely disgusting and shocking.

And another friend who had a disordered eating from being a high level gymnast.
She wasn’t even allowed to eat cake on her 12th birthday. But she would sneak an entire bag of icing sugar and eat that.