July 25, 2020 / Noordhollands Dagblad, The Netherlands
Marco Knippen @MarcoKnippen
A tough regime was to yield international success at the top. The harrowing harvest was pure torment. Top-level gymnastics in the Netherlands has come to be synonymous with fear, abuse, repression, humiliation and ultimately trauma, a price no victim wants to pay. The terror at the top isn’t limited to one coach, club or generation – quite the opposite. The abuse starts at the age of about seven, during training weeks of 28 till 40 hours.
Ten celebrated (ex-)gymnasts – the youngest 18 years old, the eldest 41 – offer a disconcerting glimpse into the world of tyranny to which they have been subjected. Anonymised and collated, because each personal tale has a common denominator.
PHYSICAL ABUSE
“The remark just slipped off my tongue, a bit cheeky, perhaps, but for the rest innocent: ‘The general stands before me.’ What followed: I was dragged by my hair though the gym hall to the changing room.
‘I can’t do it,’ I stuttered. He exploded, shouting, ‘I don’t care, you’re damn well going to do it!’ I froze, feet nailed to the floor; I still didn’t dare. He approached me, I could see the anger in his eyes. When he stood right in front of me, he slapped me hard in the face.”
“I had to take the rope again and climb up it, my fingers and palms blistered. When I reached the top, the muscles in my fingers became sore and I slid back down to the floor at almost free-fall speed. My thighs cut, scratched and burned, my right was bleeding. The coach paid no attention to it and said, ‘Stop whining! Up you go again!'”
“There was nowhere I could go, I was trapped between him and the wall. He grabbed me by the throat with both hands and lifted me off the floor by my neck, his face so close to mine that could feel his breath. I heard a snorting sound, followed by a spitting sound and felt his thick glob of spit hit my face.”
SCOLDING AND HUMILIATION
“‘Why isn’t your hair in a tied up in a tight bun, but in a loose ponytail?’ he asked. Afraid, I kept my mouth shut. Then he hissed, ‘Are you some kind of slut?'”
“My dad gave me a little bag of sweets after a competition that went very well. The coach saw. The following day, the whole group of us were gathered together and in front of everybody, he tore into me. I felt so ashamed and prayed that the floor would open up and simply swallow me away.”
“A routine I did wasn’t completely up to scratch. The head coach was angry and he shouted, ‘Right, I’ve had enough of this. You’re quitting.’ I stood there, completely deflated, not knowing what to do.
Then the assistant came along and said, ‘Come on, don’t dilly-dally, jump!’ I did and the head coach screamed at me, ‘I told you to stop, dumbo.'”
“On Sunday, I won a Dutch title. I felt proud. The next day at practice, the coach said to me, ‘Don’t put on airs about being any good, because you’re not!'”
“I took a nasty fall from the beam and was in pain. The trainer cursed the living daylights out of me and shouted that I had to get back onto it. I hesitate too long. ‘Get back onto that bloody beam, or else I’ll thrash you!'”
“Many girls developed a tic as a result of all the stress, and the coach would often taunt us. He’d start copying us really weirdly, exaggerating the habit. Belittlement was his way of breaking down any confidence we had.”
NEGLECT
“I had to do a new element on the beam for the first time. I blocked and didn’t dare anymore. The female coach turned her back; I wasn’t even worthy of a glance. I stood there on the beam, motionless, for an hour and a half.”
“A girl stumbled. She’d hurt herself and could barely stand up. Tears filled her eyes. I asked her if she was alright. Then the coach turned to me and said, ‘Shut up, you! She’s not worthy our attention.'”
“Championships I took part in didn’t go well. My performance didn’t meet the expectations. The following day, he threw the book at me and then for days, he didn’t say a word to me. I was out of favour, meant nothing to him anymore.”
“Another girl was crying. We all saw it, but we weren’t allowed to comfort her. Worse, we were made to literally turn our backs on her. ‘Crying is for pussies,’ barked the coach, ‘so, I don’t want to see you anymore. Go to the changing room.'”
“I switched from one club to another. When I entered the hall, I saw the other girls sitting on the mat looking dead beat. Nobody said a word to each other, you could hear a pin drop and the coach was sat hidden away in his booth. I sat down with the others, decided not to say anything either and thought, ‘I’m sure he’ll introduce me to the group in a minute.’ He didn’t, no introductions. Apparently, it was time to start, as the girls got up and started running laps of the hall. I followed their example, a little shaken that this had been my welcome. I felt like I was just a number right from the start.”
“A rib was causing me trouble. At the hospital, they diagnosed a stress fracture. When I told my coach at practice the next day, he sighed ‘great’ and walked off.”
“It was the final session of the week and I was tired. I had one last floor routine to go, but I summoned up all my courage and said I was exhausted. ‘Just do your routine,’ I was told. I obeyed, but I didn’t feel at all safe, for although I could feel his eyes prying in back, he left me completely to my own devices.”
MANIPULATION AND ABUSE OF POWER
“At some point, my best friend and I decided we’d quit gymnastics at the same time. The coach got wind of the idea and forbade us to see each other anymore because we were a bad influence on each other.”
“During an inter-club training session, the other coaches were nice and had a bit of fun with me. ‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘so it can be fun.’ Then I noticed my own coach doing the same with the girls from the other clubs, while their coaches are having a go at them. Moments later, my coach turned his wrath on me.”
“One moment he’d sing your praise, then next he’d put you down. He’d be charming, and then turn and be nasty. He’d keep us in constant confusion, rejecting us and then adoring us. That’s why I can’t hate him, but I was always scared of him.”
“His voice cracked out of frustration. ‘Go on then, cry, you little tramp!’ I didn’t respond, making him even angrier. My senses shut down completely, I didn’t care anymore: he wasn’t going to get to me. The only thing I thought was, ‘There’s no way I’m going to cry.’ For once, he couldn’t get the better of me.”
“There was always a little voice in my head telling me that I mustn’t give up. ‘This is what I’ve trained all my life for, right?’ It was a huge dilemma that I couldn’t solve, and left me open to blackmail by psychopath coaches.”
“A (national) coach can make you or break you. Even if you meet all the selection criteria, you can be thwarted. The goalposts are moved, pressure is put on jury members… I missed out on important events because of that kind of thing.”
“I turned up for afternoon practice one day, and there was a note on the door to the gym. It read, Welcome to (club name) Rehabilitation Centre. Left: Physical Rehab. Take the schedule from your physiotherapist make your way to the relevant apparatus and get to work. Right: for the mentally deranged. Have a nice little chat with someone or read a book. Straight on: for those who need technical advice.”
ISOLATION
“Nobody else is allowed into the gym, you’re cut off from the outside world. Parents aren’t welcome, doctors or physiotherapists only with rare exception. And if they are in any way critical, they’re out and you never see them again. I remember one doctor who, on his way to the door, mumbled just audibly. ‘This is nothing short of child abuse.'”
“Since outsiders were unwelcome, you never heard from anybody that anything untoward was going on. You felt abused and your confidence was constantly betrayed, but you didn’t know any better and started to think it was normal. ‘This is how it’s supposed to be,’ you thought. On top of that, because of all the hours you spend together, they become like a surrogate parent and you feel a similar kind of respect towards them. So, now you had a loyalty conflict, too.”
“The hidden suffering of solitary confinement is shared sadness. You know that you might be the laughing stock, but not when. The others felt exactly the same. And you didn’t talk about it amongst yourselves. Your parents were the last people you could talk to, that was drummed into you right from the very beginning. Say a word, and punishment will follow. And you knew, whatever happened, the coach would always say it was your fault.”
“You don’t even dare think about spilling the beans for fear of reprisals. Abuse is often hard to prove because it goes on behind closed doors. And of course, there’s the old unwritten rule: what happens in the gym, stays in the gym. So you bury it deep in your mind and keep your jaws shut tightly together.”
CULTURE OF FEAR
“Stress has you constantly in its grip. At night you can’t sleep because you’re too nervous about tomorrow’s practice and when tomorrow comes you head off to the gym with your heart in your boots.”
“You were alert constantly, checking his body language and behaviour. If he slowly shuffled into the hall, then you knew that he wasn’t in the mood and it was going to be hell. If he flicked on all the lights with one sweep of his arm, you thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s in a foul mood.'”
“It was like swimming into a trap. You knew what you were going to have to go through, but there was no back. So you let it happen, almost like a robot and filled with fear.”
“I really hated the coach, but you don’t even consider staying away because you’re so young and – as was my case – your parents push you so hard because they’ve been told their child has talent.”
“Gymnastics becomes the only thing in life you have to hold on to. The many hours of coaching, the brainwashing by coaches and the isolation, leave room in your life nothing else. The gymnastics culture is familiar, even though it is anything but safe. You become lonely and terribly miserable.”
“I was always frightened by the double bars because I don’t have much squeezing strength. But the coach never used to let me make them less slippery using water or magnesium powder. That was a waste of time, he used to say. But it was so incredibly dangerous, especially without hand grips, because you can slip between the bars and land on your neck.”
“The gym was always completely silent. Nobody talked to each other, music wasn’t allowed. We didn’t even dare look at each other. Hour upon hour, day in, day out, for fear of another fit of rage.”
INJURY AND PHYSICAL DISCOMFORT
“I once slipped off the double bars and hit the floor hard. My knee started to swell immediately and my shin turned blue. It hurt terribly and I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. ‘Walk properly, will you?’ is all the coach said. I had to go on, stopping wasn’t an option.”
“During a European Championships, I became depressed. I hardly slept, I just spent the night tossing and turning in by bed. On the day of the final, I felt weak and dizzy when I got up and my whole body shivered. I told our team doctor. Instead of protecting me, she merely said, ‘Just try to do your warming-up, and if it doesn’t get any worse, then you can compete as normal.’ During the competition, I found unexpected strength and managed to keep going on energy drinks. My performance was poor, of course, but all I could think was, ‘I have to get through that next routine.'”
“I had a stress fracture in my right foot. The symptoms grew worse, but the physiotherapist dismissed it, saying there was nothing wrong. To make matters worse, my coach said that pain is in your mind. A year later, the same with my left foot – I stressed out completely. All I could think was, ‘They won’t believe me anyway, so if I say anything, I’ll get bawled out.'”
“I suffered a bad injury during practice and lay crying in pain on the floor. I looked straight into the eyes of my coach sitting a short distance away; she just sat there, as if I was exaggerating. My trainer stormed off cursing and returned with an icepack that he literally threw at my head. Nobody came up me; that was forbidden in the gym. My training partner still had to do the exercise and my trainer shouted at me, ‘Get out of there, you’re lying in the way.’ I limped to the changing room, holding on to the ballet bar for support. I burst into tears and called my mum. She then came to collect me and took me to hospital.”
WEIGHT AND EATING PROBLEMS
“We had to weigh ourselves four times a day, before and after each practice session. If you hadn’t lost weight, everyone got to hear that you hadn’t worked hard enough. So, in the mornings, I dared only drink a little water for fear of growing fat.”
“Donut, cream tart, fat cow, fat pig, fatty… those kinds of words were repeated again and again to make it clear that you weren’t thin enough. Everything was associated with your weight. It becomes an obsession and after a while you don’t dare eat a thing. Nor drink anything, which leads to dehydration.”
“At one point, I was so afraid to step onto the scales that I’d first stick a finger down my throat. And then when I weighed myself, my trainer would sit watching me, eating conspicuously.”
“I always tried to prevent my coaches from throwing a fit, which meant anticipating absolutely everything so I wouldn’t be scolded. I stopped eating, for instance, so I wouldn’t be told I was fat. Very soon, of course, I had an eating disorder.”
“When you’d been to a competition and drove back with the coach, you could be sure that she’d stop at a petrol station. Not for petrol, but for two Mars bars. They weren’t for me or the other girls, but for herself, and she’d eat them in the car with us just sitting there.”
“The fear of eating sweet foods was so strong, that we did everything in secret. One day, we carefully opened a new pot of Nutella, pulled back the foil just a little, took out a tiny bit of Nutella with a knife and quickly smoothed it over again, folded back the foil and put the pot back where it came from. All the effort was for nothing: we were found out.”
“I was resting on the floor and the coach snapped, ‘The longer you sit there with your arse on the mat, the fatter it’s going to get!'”
“The trainer declared one of the other girls to be our role model: ‘Be like her!’ She suffered anorexia. His message, of course, was twofold: he was telling her that she should stay sick and telling us that we should treat our bodies in an unhealthy way.”
SCARRED FOR LIFE
“You’re robbed of your identity, feel like you’re a failure and develop social-anxiety issues. Life becomes survival. Because gymnastics was all you had, when you stop, daily life is empty and pointless.”
“You’re left with something far more serious than an identity crisis. Because your identity is taken away at such a young age, you keep getting stuck in an emptiness. You don’t feel like a person, rather an object. You’re worthless, at least, that’s what you think because that’s what you’ve always been told.”
I have nightmares almost every night, in which my coach always plays some negative role – I don’t feel safe. I then wake up in panic.”
“All the psychological torture has meant that I never learned to stand up for myself. That’s still a huge problem to this day, on top of all the guilt that haunts me.”
“Now, after ten years, I can finally acknowledge that what happened to me isn’t normal, and that makes it easier to understand the cause of all my complaints. I’m working very hard on resolving my traumas, gaining confidence in my body again and developing a personality I can call my own.”
“I didn’t know anymore what my limits were, and I severely overstretched myself. I was burned out, depressed and exhausted when my body finally – and thankfully – gave up: I suffered an injury and my gymnastics career was over. Now, even after all these years, I’ve still not recovered from the exhaustion and depression, and I can’t work.”
“I’ve been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I can be suddenly overcome by extreme fatigue and suffer depression-related complaints. I’m in therapy, but it’s still all ups and downs at the moment.”
“I have problems functioning in society. My relationships all fail because I don’t trust people, and I don’t have proper contact with my parents anymore. During every conversation I have with someone, I’m afraid they’ll become angry, or that I’ll get lectured. A simple request makes my hair stand on end because I’m so afraid to disappoint people. I still think I’m too fat, I feel ashamed of myself and for that reason, intimacy is a huge problem for me.”
Justification:
The identities of the ten gymnasts are known to the editors. Among them are World and European Championships contenders and Dutch national champions. Their statements have, where possible, been checked and verified. The editors also spoke to parents, as well as to coaches who do not feature in the statements, but who did bear witness to the events. In addition, the editors had access to a disciplinary hearing report, exchanges of letters between parents and coaches and email and text-message conversations. A conscious decision has been made to redact direct references to trainers, coaches and clubs because the malpractice goes beyond those people and those locations.