Another harrowing account from a guest. Sadly, I know of many young lives that could have been saved from long-term physical and mental injury had BG acted when they received this complaint.
To preface this account – I’ve tried to include rough dates where I remember. Our gym trained in a school sports hall so had to set out the equipment each session. Thursday we’d get out about half the equipment & return it later that night. Friday we’d set up the whole gym and take it down on Saturday evening. I’m just mentioning this at the outset as a lot of incidents refer to the setting up or down of the gym. Also, my mum is a ballet teacher and knows a lot about the human body due to her own training and now her work as a teacher. However, neither of my parents were “gym parents”, they were totally clueless about most things, and I stopped them coming to competitions from about age 11 because Coach said that they made me perform badly.
Also, another point – I have no ill feelings towards the club we were with [club name removed]. A lot of what happened took place behind closed doors – Coach drove us to Sunday training where often she was the only adult in the gym. We arrived at gym an hour early and did conditioning upstairs in a little ballet studio where again Coach was the only adult. Before or after summer training or extra training we would be at Coach’s house, as she would drive us to and from [club name removed]. Often, we’d do our conditioning outside away from other people in the gym or even running up and down narrow corridors so that other people couldn’t see. Yes, some of her behaviours, especially the name calling & shouting took place in the gym where there were other coaches and adults, but it alone could maybe just about be considered tough coaching/tough love. However, there was so much under the surface – the stuff they saw in the gym was just the tip of an iceberg. Yes, I wish other coaches would have stepped in – and sometimes they did. But looking back, they can’t have known the extent of the abuse that was going on.
2002 – I was a bridesmaid at my Godmother’s wedding and had to miss a Saturday off gym for it. I was taken to and from gym by a childminder, so my parents barely ever saw Coach face to face. My mum said she had texted and emailed Coach about the date well in advance but told me to remind her on Friday night. Typically, I forgot and ran back into the gym at the end of the session to try and find Coach but couldn’t immediately see her. Head Coach saw me and asked what was up, I told her I needed to remind Coach that I would be away for a wedding tomorrow. She said no problem she’d remind her for me.
I came into the gym the following Thursday and while we were setting up the gym, Coach was loudly bad mouthing about me (purposefully where I could hear) to other coaches. It was something along the lines of “even my own gymnasts don’t care enough to bother to tell me if they’re coming into training or not”. She mentioned that my parents were “clueless” and didn’t respect her. She said (again purposefully in my earshot) “I will just make her condition all of today anyway, will serve her right”. Sure enough, on each piece I was just told to do conditioning exercises. Each piece I asked if I could join in with the other girls or if I could do something different but she just ignored me, so I conditioned to try and get back into her good books.
I went home and told my parents I couldn’t ever miss gym again.
2000-03 – early years – was called Mowgli because I ran in a funny way and was teased for looking like I “run through a jungle” while running for vault. It went on for a while and I told my parents I didn’t like it, and they asked Coach to stop calling me it. She said I’d have to get better at vault if I wanted to get rid of the name. One session she ranked us all from famous gymnasts down to me as Mowgli, and everyone laughed. Eventually she stopped using the name, but I think she got bored with it more than anything.
2003 – one of our rival clubs was [club name removed]. One of the coaches there also judged at regional competitions. Coach didn’t like the coach. She’d joke about the quality of the girls from that gym and would threaten to send us there if we did “bad” gymnastics. We were preparing for a comp and I was having some trouble with a tumble landing. Coach said to just make sure to do that tumble into a certain corner because the judge was “too fat to see over her judging table so she won’t be able to see your legs anyway”.
2004 – We were at regionals and Coach was judging on floor, so another coach was taking us round. I had a scary fall at a competition on my beam dismount – missed my foot on my second flick and landed on my neck. I lay there dazed for a bit and the coach came over and told me not to move while they checked me out. After a few mins Coach came over and apologized to [competition organizer] for leaving her judging table but she wanted to come and see her gymnast. She then lent down and told me quietly that I was embarrassing her and to get up and present at least so the competition could continue. I did and tried to carry on for floor but bailed mid routine on a punch front because my neck hurt too much. Coach told me afterwards that she was very disappointed I hadn’t continued because it made her look like a bad coach.
2005 – like I mentioned previously we wouldn’t set out the whole gym on a Thursday. One session we were on beam and there were 2 high beams out and one low beam. The low beam just had some crash mats underneath it, but nothing covering its metal feet. I was practicing flick-flicks and on one went off-line and came off the beam, directly onto the foot of the beam. I’d broken my foot. I went straight to Coach and said my foot hurt, and she told me to stop making excuses for not wanting to do flick flicks. I tried to go back on beam but having my foot flat on the floor was extremely painful. Another teammate had broken her foot a few weeks before at school and was on a reduced training programme. When I went back to Coach saying I couldn’t continue, she laughed at me and said I was trying to copy [teammate] to get out of doing my series. I can’t remember the rest of that session, but when I got home my mum had a look at my foot that was already swelling and wanted to take me to A&E. I refused so we iced it & she strapped it up for the next day at school and gym.
When I entered the gym, first thing Coach did was laugh and tell me I was taking the mickey. I said I wanted to keep training just my foot hurt, and the tape helps a bit, but it didn’t really matter she kept laughing/calling my parents gullible for believing me. I ignored the pain as much as possible and tried to train through it. I don’t really remember much of the session again, apart from not doing tumble and conditioning instead, so it must have been very sore at that point. My mum picked me up that night and saw my foot (which was swollen & had a nasty looking lump out the side) and took me to A&E, where they said I’d broken it. I begged them to not put it in a cast or even a boot, as I didn’t want Coach to say I was making even more of a fuss. Mum tried to tell me I had an x-ray so she had to believe them, but I still refused a cast or boot. Eventually they agreed on one of those half boot support things & crutches. We’d been in the hospital until past midnight and my mum wanted me to take the next day off gym but I begged her to let me go.
I went in on crutches and my dad explained to Coach that I’d broken my foot, and the rest of that day she just sort of ignored me. No apology for not believing me or anything, no special programme like my teammate had, I was just left to do my own thing. She would still support me (e.g. with everyone else on bars) but just wouldn’t direct me in anything, I basically just did as much as I could do, and if I couldn’t do something then I’d condition by myself. After a week or so of this response from Coach, she started to “care”. At the time I thought “yes, she’s noticed how hard I’m working and how I’m still in the gym even though my foot is broken, and how I’m not complaining and not asking her for anything” and she “rewarded” me with an adapted programme/conditioning that I could do with my foot. There was a comment at one point “you see girls, I’m always watching to see if you work hard when you think I’m not watching. She has been pushing herself hard in conditioning and I want you all to learn from that”. We were basically all told there was always something we could do so there was no excuse to ever miss gym.
This mindset fed into how much holiday we were allowed too. The general rule was 2 days over Christmas (Christmas day & Boxing day), plus 2 weeks in summer. Then it became 1 week in summer. My parents put their foot down and said that I needed the break. Yet another reason Coach didn’t like them too much – they stood up to her, and as a result she would paint them as “clueless” parents who didn’t understand the sort of training gymnasts needed.
The day before a twin-piece competition (I realise a lot of regions don’t have these, but basically two gymnasts split the four pieces between them – it’s a fun friendly comp) I landed on a straight leg on beam and jarred my knee. Coach rolled her eyes and walked away. I rolled off the mat and another coach came over to see if I was ok. I was more upset and worried about what Coach would think if I couldn’t compete. I tried to explain this to the other coach, who was lovely and basically said if you can’t compete you can’t – your health is more important. She sat with me for a bit and calmed me down, and then took me back to beam to see how my leg was, if you can’t do your beam you won’t be able to compete tomorrow. I could walk on it but couldn’t fully straighten it and couldn’t take off any jumps or acro because it hurt too much and felt unstable. This coach very gently told me what I already knew – I shouldn’t compete. I was terrified to find Coach and tell her. I remember more eye rolling, and then being pulled into the equipment cupboard (a big empty space behind a roller shutter where all the gym equipment was kept during the week, but at this time on a Saturday was completely empty. It was the only place parents couldn’t see into from the viewing gallery). She shouted at me for letting my teammate down, for being weak, for always being injured & not being worth her time. I was then told I’d better go and condition as that was all I was good at. The cupboard was a good place to cry when Coach told us to get out of her face – it was either the cupboard or the dark hallway near the changing rooms.
My teammate ended up competing anyway as a guest and did all four pieces. She did really well on bars and beam, which were meant to be the pieces I would have competed, and as a result the next time in the gym everyone in the group was laughing at me and thanking me for getting injured so that my teammate could do so well.
We had regular punishments for not doing skills or training hard enough. One vivid memory is of one of my teammates being scared to do free cartwheels on beam so until she did, we had to run around the gym. Bear in mind this was a sports hall so concrete floor, and we were barefoot. We weren’t allowed to stop for water or to go to the toilet, and my teammate on the beam was terrified and balling her eyes out. We ran for over an hour and a half. There was a dividing curtain between two halves of the sports hall, and we would run around the back of it because we could slow down a bit while we were hidden from view. Coach cottoned onto this after a while and started whacking at the curtain with her shoe if she saw us slowing down. I don’t think she ever made contact (at least I don’t remember contact), although one of my teammates did trip over a shoe that got thrown in front of us as we ran.
Conditioning was a competition to see who she could break. We all wanted to be the strongest. I was incredibly competitive and also pretty strong, and that combination meant that I would usually push myself to breaking point if it meant being the last person in chin-up hold, or the last person to stop running, the person to do the most amount of press ups etc.
Saturdays were usually 9-11:30 for conditioning, then 30 min lunch, then train until 4pm. Another club would sometimes come and train with us on Saturdays. I remember vividly them training with us on one particular conditioning session. We had to do 3 sets of 10 chin ups, hold chin up position for 10. 3 sets in a row. This was meant to be the last thing before lunch, so we’d already been going for almost 2 hours. If one person came down during the hold, we all had to get down and start again. We did this for over an hour. All of us were crying – basically weeping. There was always one person that couldn’t quite hold it for the final 10 seconds. I remember one time refusing to get down but it was like my fingers were slowly peeling off the bars of their own accord and I had to drop. Other groups went on lunch break, we were still trying to complete the final set. If you were the one who dropped you’d get screamed at, things like “you’ve failed, you’ve let your team down, you’re hurting them, they’re only being punished because you’re too lazy to do this”. Eventually we all managed and were allowed to go for lunch, I think it was about 1pm. I just remember sitting on the floor in the corridor dazed, arms too heavy to lift to my mouth to eat my sandwich, exhausted from crying just as much as the conditioning.
2005 – my dad was driving me to gym on a Saturday morning and we were about 5 mins away when we got hit by another car. I was in the front passenger seat and the other car hit my side between the front and rear doors. I saw the car coming and so tensed up and shouted out. My dad checked I was ok and then jumped out and checked in with the other driver. They were doing all the exchanging details etc and I climbed across to get out the other side of the car. I was just standing near the car in shock. Another gym mum was driving past at the time and saw me, pulled over to check we were ok. My dad was quite flustered and when she offered to give me a lift to the gym we both said yes and off I went. I told Coach what happened when I arrived as I was about 15 mins late to the session, but she was more focused on me being late. At this point we trained at [a different club] on Sundays, which we all usually got dropped off at Coach’s house for and she would drive us the 45 mins there. I lived about 30 mins from our gym in the opposite direction and our car was a write off, so Coach asked me to call my parents and see if I could stay overnight with a teammate so I could still train the next day. I just remember calling my mum at work and saying, “oh so you know how we don’t have a car anymore” and she hadn’t been told yet so was more than a bit shocked! I stayed over with a friend and went to training the next day, and Coach dropped me home after too. I’d been complaining of neck pain on bars and back pain when punching on floor, but basically had just brushed it off as I didn’t want to come across as moaning. It didn’t get any better though over the next few weeks, so I went for a scan and was told I had had serious whiplash and as a result of ignoring it now had a bulging disc in my upper back/lower neck. I feel like my parents must have told Coach, but I don’t remember this at all, or remember training any differently. Eventually I got used to the pain.
2006 – a joint summer camp with another gym, held at [club name removed]. We all slept in one big room upstairs, then had a morning and an evening session per day. On about the 3rd night, all us kids had gone to bed, but the coaches and parents were in the bar area. I felt very sick and ran to the toilets to throw up. A parent overheard and came through. I went and sat with the adults for a bit. After a while I went back to bed with a bowl. About half an hour later I threw up again, but this time there was blood in it. The same parent was very concerned and wanted to call my parents, but Coach said I would be fine in the morning. I remember being moved beds to be nearer the coaches, but I don’t fully remember the ins and outs of that night. In the morning I woke up with a blinding headache. I was in the front row of warm up/complex on the floor and it felt like the whole room was spinning. I asked if I could leave and get some water, and when I did I spoke to the same parent (they didn’t come into the gym but waited either upstairs or in the foyer). I let her call my parents but I made her promise not to tell them I’d been sick. I said to them I felt a bit funny but it was probably tiredness. I don’t remember much else of the day other than being let off doing my beam series/ going backwards on beam for that day. The rest of the camp is a bit of a blur and I don’t remember much.
Challenge cup 2006 – I got a Facebook message from Coach a few days before Challenge Cup, which was due to be a Saturday, and was told that she can’t come to my competitions anymore because she had other kids to train. All the others were on the elite in-age pathway and by this point of the year were done with their major comps, so were solely focused on upgrades. I got upset – this was my own British qualifier and my coach was telling me I wasn’t important enough to her to bother coming. I told my parents how upset I was and they got in touch with her to say that they were angry and disappointed with her decision. The day of the comp, without warning, Coach showed up at my house with one of my teammates to drive me to the comp. The whole way, she said how I’d better make this worth their time, that I’d asked for teammate to be pulled out of her training to come and watch (I hadn’t) and I’d better qualify or else. So I arrived at the venue incredibly stressed. I knew qualifying would be tight because my vault was super basic as I’d not had time to train after a niggling injury, but I did know I could do it. Bars and beam went well. Vault was fine but very low score due to start value. Floor was my final piece and warm up had been pretty bad, I felt like I had no power. My floor routine was good, went into the final tumble but my flick went funny (I don’t know if I was overthinking things) and my hands barely touched the floor. I panicked and instead of a double twist I did a single. Coach was fuming when I came off the floor even though I tried to explain. I obviously lost 0.5 from my start value for not ending on a C value skill and ended up missing qualifying by 0.2. On the way home Coach made my teammate sit in the front seat and ignored me the whole time, apologising to teammate for the waste of her day, making comments about what she could have been doing instead.
My parents came up against Coach a lot. They weren’t particularly involved in my gym career – they loved me and supported me in everything I wanted to do, but they never pushed me and they let me make my own decisions. It was also a bi product of their work patterns, as my mum as a ballet teacher worked evenings and Saturdays, so never really took me to gym, and my dad worked in the city only getting home around 7pm. I relied on lifts from other parents or a childminder to take me (plus my younger brother too young to stay home) to and from the gym. I’d stay over at a friend’s house on Friday nights so I could get to the gym earlier on a Saturday, and to eliminate two extra trips for my parents. I always got the impression Coach didn’t really like them, so I tried to limit the amount of time they had to spend together. My mum has a posh sounding accent and Coach would mock it in the gym, so I tried to make sure it was always my dad who spoke to her. My mum got incredibly nervous at competitions, and Coach said it made me perform badly, so I stopped my parents coming. I have basically no comp footage or pictures of me as a result. When Coach started to regulate our diets (she sent us home with a printout of what we were and weren’t allowed to eat), my mum said screw that. She had gone through similar at ballet school and didn’t want me to develop an eating disorder or negative body image. She said she would always cook healthy and nutritional meals, but would never limit my portion size, as surprisingly children who do sport every night a week get hungry (who would have thought!). She would openly say this to Coach, and as a result Coach would mock her to the other gym parents and use her as an example to get them on her side.
2007 – During a competition I fell flat on my back on my bars dismount. I was winded and dazed but got up and carried on with the comp. For the next few weeks I was in a lot of pain but mainly doing drills that landed on my back (e.g. vault drills) or when I got out of breath. I noticed I was getting out of breath a lot more often. In the summer if the weather was good we would do some of conditioning outside and use the athletics track, and I remember only managing one lap when we were meant to do two of each circuit. A few weeks later mum was driving me back from the gym and I screamed when we went over a speed bump. I’d been seeing an osteopath regularly and we went to him who thought I might have a broken rib. We went and got an x-ray which confirmed I had broken a rib and it wasn’t settling (because I wasn’t resting at all) and it had punctured my left lung. I was told bed rest for a week, and then light training for 6 weeks until it was fully healed. I did the bed rest but as soon as I was back in the gym it was basically business as normal and I didn’t take it easy at all. This was around Sept/Oct time. Challenge cup was coming up and I was determined to qualify for the British having missed out the previous year. My immune system was pretty low because of being ill and being on steroids for my breathing, so I caught a virus which made my breathing worse. I was told to “suck it up” in the gym. When we trained at [gym name removed] it was unbearable because of the dust from the pit and the heat in the gym (it’s basically a tin box heated by the sun all day), but we wouldn’t be allowed to go and get water if we ran out – it would be a lesson to us for not bringing enough water with us in the first place. It basically felt as though I had a stitch 100% of the time from my left side across and up my sternum. It got so bad that I couldn’t breathe if I lay down, so I’d sleep sitting up in a chair or propped up against the wall in bed. So, then I started having trouble sleeping or having the energy to get up out of bed because my body was using all of its energy to try and help me breathe. I went from being in the gym 24 hours a week, plus ballet, rugby and school sport, to not being able to go to school. From November onwards I was housebound and basically bedbound.
In the new year I eventually got diagnosed with costochondritis (inflammation of the cartilage around the sternum) and ME/CFS, which the specialist said was incredibly rare and worrying in someone so young. My mum would email Coach with updates but never really hear much back. I stayed connected with some of the girls through Facebook and texting but that was hard too. It must have been in the springtime when my parents sat me down and told me that Coach had left [club name removed] and took the group with her. We found out through the parent of one of the girls that decided not to go with Coach, who also told my parents that Coach had been fired from the club and wasn’t just “moving on” like she later told us. I got a Facebook message from Coach saying how “devastated” her and the girls were that I wasn’t coming with them, but to stay in touch as she still wanted to be involved with my gymnastics. It was the first message she’d sent me in my whole time off ill. I slowly got better during 2008 and went back to the club for a bit with a different coach, but eventually decided to move to a club closer to my house and my school.
2009 – I was with new coaches and a new club. I’d got back to fitness and surpassed where I’d been before I got sick. In March 2009 we had regional squad training which was being held at [club name removed]. It was meant to just be the regional team there, but Coach was there with her group just training as normal. They were on bars when we arrived, and she told one of the girls to do a skill to show off to the other coaches.
My coach noticed that I’d had an off reaction when I first saw Coach. She ignored me mostly and just focused on her girls. Later on, we were on beam and she was conditioning her girls by the rope’s & pommel in the corner. I did a bad beam dismount as she was walking past and she said, “what the [expletive] was that”, then “I didn’t teach you [expletive] gymnastics like that”. I sort of laughed while trying to hide the fact that tears were coming into my eyes, then I asked the head coach if I could use the toilet. My coach followed me into the corridor where I proceeded to have a full-on panic attack. My coach calmed me down and reminded me that I’m training for myself – I have nothing to prove to Coach. We talked the whole way home and I felt like some of the weight had lifted a bit. Coach Facebook messaged me to say she hoped she didn’t “upset me” with her comments, that even if something is perfect, she will still find fault and that I’ll always be her gymnast. I didn’t reply, & when I went back through those messages recently that one in particular really made me anxious.
My coach alerted my parents that something might be wrong with the way I was coached under Coach, after seeing my reaction in the gym with her. My parents sat me down and we had a proper conversation about my time with Coach. I didn’t tell them everything or even very many details, but I told them how I felt especially while I was off ill. While I was ill and bed bound, I basically felt as though I was a failure, a waste of space, that darkness was closing in and I’d never escape it. I’d never be good enough to impress Coach, I’d never be strong enough to get up again, being in the darkness and pain was my punishment for not listening to Coach and for being too scared to follow what she was trying to teach me. With the support of the head coach at my new club, we submitted a safeguarding incident report to British Gymnastics in March 2009. I vividly remember sitting round the kitchen table writing it with my parents. In June/July my dad called the safeguarding and welfare officer for our region at British Gymnastics to chase up our report. We were told to report it to our club welfare officer. We explained that we had left the club where the incidents had occurred, and so had the coach. The BG officer said that they would “investigate” but they weren’t sure if they could do anything as it wasn’t reported while I was training with her i.e. I hadn’t reported via official club channels. We didn’t chase any further, and I’m angry with myself for this.
Years later seeing Coach all over BG’s YouTube channel and to see her running coaching clinics and being promoted made me think that something must have changed. I trusted that systems had been put in place, or similar behaviours couldn’t still be happening because no way would BG promote a coach like that, nor would she be able to get away with it. It’s hard reading reports in the years since and knowing that there have been at least 4 other formal complaints made to BG since my initial report. Coach knows what she has done and doesn’t see anything wrong with it because it “produces results” (a friend and ex-coach told me that she cut ties with Coach after hearing her say “show me a way to produce results without using my methods and I’ll listen” – full awareness and no remorse for her behaviour). It’s hard thinking that I have had and will always have ME (even if I have periods of remission) and respiratory issues because of how hard my body was pushed as a child. It’s hard to remember the two years of my adult life where I was crippled by anxiety and depression, terrified to let anyone in/to trust that someone else wouldn’t just walk away from me because I was too much work. It’s hard to know that although I am no longer crippled by these mental health issues, they will never go away, and it is only through antidepressants and learning how to trust others again and talk about my feelings that I am able to live without fear. It’s hard to see stories almost identical to these come up from gymnasts all over the world, but I hope that by doing so that real change can come about in this sport. I also hope that those who have caused this pain will be held accountable and justice will be served – clean out the mould within the food chain so that the rest doesn’t rot. I hope that this movement brings healing and hope to gymnasts all over the world.
#gymnastalliance
If you have been affected by or witnessed maltreatment in the gymnastics setting you can speak to a trained NSPCC counsellor on 0800 056 0566.