Violence in Sports

Fifteen year-old Christy Henrich could think of little else except her weight. "I've got to lose weight", she told her mother. "A judge told me I’d never make the Olympic team if I don’t lose weight". Christy weighed 90 pounds and stood 4 feet 11 inches. That night Christy virtually stopped eating.

She began gymnastics before kindergarten and by the time she was 7, her coach had her training 4 to 5 hours a day, a minimum of four days a week. By age 13 she had made the junior national team and practiced 3 hours in the gym before school and about 6 hours after school. She was also a straight A student. She was either in school or at the gym all day, so no one noticed she was just eating an apple, sometimes just a slice of apple, each day. Though her mother worried that Christy pushed herself too hard, she knew gymnastics meant everything to her and let her go on.

Her goal was the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. She learned, as elite gymnasts do, to seal her emotions in little boxes and store them somewhere dark and deep. The coaches could scream, throw tantrums, stamp in frustration, but the girls had to hold their tongues.

Food became the enemy. Christy was a prime candidate for anorexia - self- imposed starving and bulimia, the potentially fatal cycle of binging and purging. Anorexics and bulimics usually are adolescent girls who tend to be perfectionists, who conform and please, who gauge their worth on other people's judgments. They are also girls who have been belittled and humiliated, who believe they are as worthless as the authority figures in their lives say they are. Gymnasts, in general, fit the bill. The girls make few decisions on their own, transforming them into whatever their coaches, parents and judges want them to be.

Christy’s weight dropped to 85 pounds, then to 80. Her coach once remarked that she looked like a Pillsbury Dough Boy and reminded her of how wonderfully thin the Russian gymnasts were. The coach's memories are different. He insists he never talked about weight. Other girls at his gym say he did. If he didn't, he was the only elite gymnast coach in America not to do so.

By 1990, Christy was so weak, she pulled out from a competition. A United States Gymnastics Federation official confronted her coach about training the girl too hard, but the coach dismissed her concerns, later blaming the falls on Christy's infuriating inconsistency – "I could never count on her, never".

In early 1991, 18 months before her second shot at the Olympics, Christy announced her retirement from the sport. She could no longer push herself through a routine, but denied she was leaving due to a physical problem. Many suspected the true reason for her retirement, but it was only in 1993 that she and her parents publicly acknowledged the depth of the problem.

Only in recent years, nearly a decade after 1972 Olympian Cathy Rigby was hospitalized twice during a 12-year bout with bulimia, has the American Gymnasts Federation stopped pretending that eating disorders don't exist. The federation has organized seminars for coaches, printed articles, created an advisory board and produce testimonials from former gymnasts who survived eating disorders. Yet despite their efforts to combat the problem, gymnastic officials still bristle at the mention of it. They point to parents, a few uneducated coaches and more than anything, the media’s glorification of thinness.

The research is there and its conclusions are clear. In a 1992 University of Washington study of 182 female college athletes, 32 % practiced at least one form of disordered eating and among college gymnasts, the percentage nearly doubled to 62%.

According to Laura Robinson, former Canadian Olympic cyclist, the trend started at the Munich Olympics in 1972 with the Russian Gymnastic Team. In her book entitled, Black Tights, Women, Sport and Sexuality, Robinson writes about 14 year-old Olga Korbut who stole the show. Recently, Korbut spoke out about the conditions the Soviet women’s team endured when she was training. She told the BBC that the head coach regularly raped the girls none of who were old enough to be considered a woman and denied them food. They were literally his slaves and they were routinely imprisoned until they performed to his expectations. The little bodies that so many people imagined as beautiful and healthy were in fact ravaged and raped.

Today, this pixie doll look is the norm in sports like gymnastics and figure skating- sports that are fetishized by a culture that has lost the ability to accept the grace, power and presence of the strong female body.

Clare Hall-Patch rise to the podium of the World Junior Road Cycling Championships in 2000 was as swift as her pedaling. Three years earlier at the age of 14, she was just sitting around smoking when the cycling coach at her high school asked her to come out for a ride. Everything changed. By the end of her second year of high school racing, she was already for the national circuit.

This Victoria native was on the way to an impressive career when a serious knee injury sidelined her for 2 months. "I got depressed," she said "and your appetite begins to shut down. I got a bit fuzzy and I lost a ton of weight". Two and half months later when her injury was healed; she got back on her bike with a totally different body. If she wanted to keep that body, Hall-Patch knew she'd have to change her eating habits and went from being anorexic to bulimic. Hall-Patch was afraid to face a life without cycling, and by starving herself, she was starving her mind. She was able to avoid thinking about what lay in store for her. She was suffering from anorexia athletica- an intense fear of fatness in already lean people that is characterized by reduced energy intake and an obsession with exercise, sometimes combined with laxatives, vomiting and diuretics, but she was luckier than most. She had strong family support, yet still found it hard to get off this eating merry go round. She still goes for counseling and now recognizes that her eating disorder is a long-term chronic illness.

As early as 1992, the Coaching Association of Canada (CAC) noted that nearly 1/3 of Canadian female athletes had disordered eating. Although the executive director of CAC hoped this new awareness would help raise these issues, according to Robinson, 10 years later the problem has only gotten worse.

Conservative groups, such as the Canadian Academy of Sport Medicine (CASM and CAC would admit that sport, which we all like to think of as healthy, could instead lead to devastating physical disabilities, diseases and deaths, speaks to the prevalence of eating disorders among female athletes. Certain member universities of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) have banned weigh-ins and body composition assessments. This is a good start, but we must go further to really address the problem.

In July, 2001, the CASM's Women's Issues in Sport Medicine Committee called for the end of weigh-ins and body composition assessments for all athletes and dancers in Canada. Later in Sept., the members of the CASM endorsed and supported the motion by the WIISM concerning the alarming information on girls and eating disorders. The WIISM presented a paper called Strategies to Reduce Disordered Eating Among Female Athletes. Lead author, Dr. James Carson stated that we need to change culture and attitudes that are prevalent in sports and abandon routine body composition testing for physically active women.

In an article in the Globe and Mail, Aug.14, 2004, a section on gymnastics notes that many of the female gymnasts competing in the Athens Olympics are in their 20’s and have mature, womanly bodies. The Russian medal favourite is 25 and 5 foot 4 inches. She weighs 101 pounds, which is still petite but compared to Nadia Comaneci, star of the 1976 Olympics, who was a half a foot shorter and 13 pounds lighter. There is some change. Fears grew from eating disorders and that young girls were being pushed to hard. Since 1996, the International Gymnastics Federation changed the rules so that girls had to be 16 to compete in the Olympics.

Elizabeth is one of Noel Dockery's girls. Dockery ran a riding stable and from 1970, when he established himself in Canada, to 1996, when he was arrested on a total of 10 sex related charges, dozens of girls went through his riding establishments. Looking back, Elizabeth said that "the whole process started very slowly. It was very insidious…it starts with comments, hand gestures, and body language, adjusting my saddle and doing these things with his hands. Once you're in the saddle, he was mauling you a bit and making comments about your breasts. I was ripe for the picking. I was 15 and he was 36 and my parents weren’t paying for lessons." Elizabeth felt indebted to Dockery and he very quickly transformed that indebtedness into a physical relationship. "I never imagined that anyone would believe me. Now I feel guilty because it happened to others after me and I didn't stop it. But I didn't know who I would talk to." Elizabeth is now a woman in her 40's and is a social worker. She sometimes finds herself counseling other survivors and occasionally perpetrators. But she says she’s been permanently damaged.

Author Laura Robinson interviewed Elizabeth and discussing the case prompted the same reaction as it did for the other women Robinson interviewed. Robinson began to delve into this subject and wrote an article in 1992 for the Toronto Star entitled, "Sexual Abuse: Sport's Dirty Little Secret." Although no names were mentioned, many women began calling her with stories of coaches and sexual abuse. When she covered different sporting events, Robinson asked many groups of girls the same question. Did they ever have a coach who crossed the line? She always found one who answered in the affirmative. She began working on a documentary called "Crossing the Line" with Susan Teskey of CBC's Fifth Estate. In Crossing the Line they told stories of athletes from rowing, volleyball and swimming. It went to air in 1993 and broke a 10-year ratings record.

Sport Canada formed a committee of athletes and staff to address the many troubling issues the documentary raised and in 1994 the CAAWS, in conjunction with numerous other Canadian Sports organizations, published Harassment in Sport: A Guide to Policies, Procedures and Resources. This document defined harassment in a broad way that included physical and sexual assault, outlined ethical, legal and social terms why harassment is unacceptable, and listed reasons why harassment occurs in the first place. Given that it was the first official statement by government and sports associations in the country, it was strongly worded. Unfortunately, no one seems to be able to track down how this very good piece of work was actually integrated into the sports system.

In 1997, the Canadian Professional Coaches Association finally agreed on a policy of conduct. Section 30 of this policy states that abusers can't coach while they're serving their jail term, but nothing prevents them from coaching once they've finished their sentence unless the CPCA chooses "further disciplinary action."

It seems that very few of the recommendations in the CAAW'S harassment guide were implemented in Canada until 1997. That year, the best junior hockey coach in Canada pleaded guilty to 350 counts of sexual assault after 2 former players went to the police.

Sheldon Kennedy was the first to go public and this news was all over the papers. Men and boys from across the country began to come forward and talk about the abuse they suffered at the hands of their coaches. Although we had been exposing sexual abuse in female athletes since 1992, the problem was virtually ignored. All of a sudden sport writers who had completely disregarded stories about female athletes who had been raped were tripping over themselves in their indignation over what this hockey coach had done.

A report by a collective formed under Sports Canada stated that "The issue of harassment and abuse in sport came into the public eye in 1997," never mentioning the brave young women who told their stories in 1993.

Why do we have such a hard time accepting that girls and young women are at great risk of sexual abuse at the hands of their coaches?

In 2000, the Canadian Hockey Association put out a workbook for coaches entitled "Speak Out". It outlines why any kind of abuse is wrong-emotional, physical or sexual- against children, how to prevent it and what to do if you suspect it has occurred. While this is a positive step and the workbook makes it clear that it is never appropriate for a coach to form a sexual relationship with a player under the age of majority, for players over the age of majority, it is not so unequivocal. It uses words like "should be discouraged" and "under their control."

Despite all this, many positive changes for women have been implemented. In 1994, the Canadian Olympic Association drafted a harassment policy that has been included in all athlete orientation packages since then. Today, sports associations must have a harassment policy before they can receive Sport Canada funding. The National Sports Centre in Calgary and the University of Calgary's sexual harassment office now offers a workshop called "Out of Bounds" to athletes who train in that jurisdiction and even brought the campaign to the Salt Lake City Olympic organizing team. However Laura Meisener, a former national team gymnast, while doing her masters thesis, found no implementation strategy put in place by Sport Canada to ensure that athletes are protected.

In 1996, Athletes Canada sent out a survey on sexual harassment and abuse by people in positions of power. Under confidentiality and anonymity, 266 high level athletes responded. One in five athletes had what they described as "consensual" sexual intercourse with a person of authority in their sport. The majority of these athletes were female. Of the 58 who admitted this, 26% reported being insulted, ridiculed, slapped, and hit. 23 athletes said they had been raped or survived an attempted rape. Added together a total of 81 athletes or 30.5% had had some kind of sexual encounter. A stunning 86% of female athletes said they felt at risk and believed they were vulnerable to sexual abuse and harassment.

When we're confronted with statistics like that, we really must ask ourselves exactly what is happening to girls and women in sport in Canada. When we view the numbers, in conjunction with eating disorders, a problem that often goes hand in hand with sexual abuse- we have to admit that there is something desperately wrong with the sporting culture. Sport can hardly be thought of as a good and healthy experience for girls when so much is so clearly wrong.