FINALLY IT’S TIME TO HEAL PAIN
Damning report showed hundreds of gymnasts, like Nathalie Moutia, were failed. She says that now ...
FOR many, this is only the start of their journey. The gymnast who asked for a toilet break and was ordered to climb a rope. The crying child in a dunce’s cap. The girls ashamed of their periods. More than 400 people submitted their experiences to the Whyte Review, published last week, two years after the first swathe of gymnasts came forward with 3,800 complaints of abuse. The Whyte Review lays bare the putrid culture of fear and abuse at the heart of British Gymnastics. The ‘tyranny of the scales’.
The injuries labelled as weakness.
The obsession with weight. The malnourished athletes called fat, forced to hide food in their socks as coaches scoured hotel rooms and travel bags for any sign of crumbs.
Now, at last, they have been heard. At last, they have been vindicated. And, now, at last they can heal.
‘This review is the start of the healing process for thousands of gymnasts,’ Nathalie Moutia, a former GB rhythmic gymnast and British champion, tells The Mail on Sunday. ‘They will all be relating to each other at this moment, drawing on each other’s experiences and they can say, yes, what we were feeling wasn’t right. It’s not the way it should have been. The question now is who is going to be there to support them?’
Moutia was one who spoke out two years ago.
She represented her country for more than a decade. She is in her forties now and lives with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which she says was brought on by the abuse she suffered under the care of British Gymnastics.
‘We were starved in our training camps,’ says Moutia. ‘We were weighed two or three times a day. You would be given not even half a slice of brown bread and black tea for breakfast and you would not be allowed to eat for the rest of the day when you will be training for seven hours.
‘Being pushed to train on injuries, being physically pushed down in splits. For me, the main thing was the psychological and emotional trauma. You would relive it every day. For a long, long time, I couldn’t even watch gymnastics on the television. If I met someone, I wouldn’t even tell them I was a gymnast. Whereas now I’m actually very proud of my achievements.
‘If you are a young woman and someone is saying to you “you’re fat, you’re going to have problems now because you’re going to start your period soon and that’s not a good thing”, it makes you have this very self-conscious image about yourself when you are like maybe 12-13 years old, and then you just don’t want to tell anyone because you feel so ashamed and you think it is wrong. And that impacts on all sorts of things. It impacts your ability to have relationships and sustain relationships. I’ve witnessed gymnasts getting slapped, witnessed gymnasts being beaten, kicked, sworn at.’
That culture, clearly, is nothing new. Moutia’s story is the same as many of the current generation of gymnasts.
Ruby Harrold, a Commonwealth gold medallist who represented Team GB at the 2016 Olympics told The Mail on Sunday two years ago of British Gymnastics’ ‘rotten core’.
‘You are made to understand this is going to get you to the Olympics, going to get you medals,’ she said in July 2020. ‘If you cry or complain, you are weak. You are told that is not the mentality of a champion.’
Catherine Lyons, a former
European junior champion, claimed she was beaten, starved and locked in a cupboard by a British Gymnastic coach.
Olympian sisters Ellie and Becky Downie spoke of an abusive behaviour that had been ‘completely normalised’. In the wake of the Whyte Review, Becky said: ‘It feels like a vindication for myself and so many who have known for so long of the serious cultural problems within the sport. A sport I love more than anything.
‘Finally everyone knows the truth and while it will not directly benefit those who have experienced it, it is encouraging to know that if the recommendations are implemented, it will protect and enhance the next generation of gymnasts.’
And that is where what happens next is so crucial. The Whyte Review listed 17 recommendations to ‘shift the focus of the sport to the gymnasts’ welfare and wellbeing’. British Gymnastics chief executive Sarah Powell apologised.
Yet campaign group Gymnasts for Change said the review’s recommendations are ‘too little, too late’. The future may be brighter but what of those whose experiences, through the abuse by those who had a duty of care, have left them with eating disorders and behavioural issues?
‘What happens to these gymnasts now?’ asks Moutia, who has begun research into the science of how trauma impacts behaviour and is building a mobile app to assist with therapy for those who have suffered.
‘British Gymnastics will be held to account. They might change everything. It will be brand new and wonderful but there’s still a group of people who have been impacted by their behaviour and they have got nothing.
‘They are still having to live through that and, for some of those gymnasts, it will be years to get over it. It has taken me more that 25 years.
‘There will be gymnasts who don’t even realise they are impacted. It might come to them in 10 years. What I’ve had to learn is that those negative experiences will always be there and you will always have that fight. Every day will be a battle to train yourself not to dwell in that place.’