Article by Julian Linden, courtesy of the Herald Sun.
The investigators heard multiple reports of how skinfold tests and weigh-ins were used to body shame and publicly humiliate female competitors, leading to eating disorders, self harm and athletes quitting the sport. ‘I wasn’t naturally a thin girl and I starved myself because the coach told me my body would ‘look more palatable’ to selectors.”Others were told: “What am I going to do with your big f–king hips. You’re fat and that is why you are slow. Lay off the dessert.”
Some swimmers told how they were weighed in front of their teammates, or had to call out their weights in team meetings so they could be recorded on a public notice board. Any swimmers who were deemed too heavy were ordered to run around the pool in front of all their teammates as a form of punishment. Others spoke of being labelled with highly derogatory terms.
“This put me in a tailspin where I started to starve myself to meet my coach’s expectations which impacted me at school, friendship groups, home life and training.”
“My coach would make me get out of the pool and run laps of the pool to try to lose this weight. And I’m like running around the (the pool) crying.”
Several parents told the investigators of how their kids developed eating disorders after being told they were “fat”.
Some swimmers explained how they would make themselves vomit after eating meals, while ingesting laxatives to keep their weight down. Others were told their “boobs” were too big.
One swimmer said: “My teammates and I used to purge after meals. We’d sneak pizza to our room, then use the toothbrush to make ourselves vomit.”
The investigators did not hear one single positive report about nutritionists.
Every comment about nutritionists was considered negative, yet no action appears to have been taken.
LACK OF FEMALE COACHES
Although roughly half the competitors in the Australian team are female, Australia rarely, if ever selects female coaches for the national team. At the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, females won eight of nine gold medals in swimming, but there was not a single female coach on the Dolphins squad.
A female coach said: “I don’t see how they can justify not taking a single woman. We have several who are of that standard, but they get overlooked because it’s just a big boys’ club”.
A swimmer said seeing an all-male – and old male – coaching staff selected for the Olympics made her “blood boil”.
A senior Swimming Australia staff member said no female coaches had met the criteria for selection. Another said athletes don’t want to be coached by women, a notion that was strongly refuted by competitors.
The dark secrets of Australian swimming’s sordid treatment of female athletes and coaches has been laid bare in a scathing independent review into its toxic culture.
The report, delivered in December 2021, just months after the swim team basked in the glow of their most successful Olympic Games in Tokyo, revealed women were subjected to physical and mental abuse, groping, disgusting sexual innuendo, body shaming and public humiliation.
“Your body looks like a sausage roll,” one athlete was told by her coach. Another swimmer was told: “With an arse like that, you’ll never be a champion”.
One swimmer said: “Taking up swimming was the worst decision my parents ever made (for me), and my life has been destroyed as a result.”
Parents told investigators they now lament getting their kids involved in the sport.
“She realised her dreams of becoming an Olympian, but I think I ruined her life,” one said.
For the first time the full and shocking details of the six month investigation that Swimming Australia has refused to fully release to the public can be revealed.
The harrowing 114-page review into the experiences of women and girls in Australian swimming, titled Beneath The Surface: The Experiences Of Women And Girls In Swimming, by investigators Chris Ronalds, Katherine Bates and Professor Alex Parker, heard from 158 participants – including former and current athletes, parents, coaches, technical officials, volunteers and administrators.
Some of the testimony they heard was so shocking that the sport’s authorities ordered all the documents to be destroyed so the Australian public never heard how deep the problems really are.
Swimming Australia has refused to release the full report, despite being urged to do so by the panellists.
However, the Saturday Herald Sun has been shown a leaked copy of the report, which reveals how the investigators had already protected the identities of all the informants who came forward.
None have been identified, which raises uncomfortable questions about why Swimming Australia refused to release the findings.
Swimming Australia said: “We cannot release the full report due to the confidentiality guaranteed to participants, the themes of the report are clear in the recommendations and provide public accountability for our steps forward.
“The Board had considered public release of the full report, however, decided against release due to the significant risk to the confidentiality, and potentially mental health, of those people who had provided input to the panel.”
Critics of Swimming Australia’s previous approach to dealing with abuse cases would no doubt argue the answer is likely to be that the report paints a deeply disturbing picture of the country’s most successful and highest-funded Olympic sport.
The report, which details sickening claims of abuse, is far worse than the summary provided by Swimming Australia because it includes traumatic statements from survivors.
Although no criminal charges resulted from the investigations, the list of findings from the report is long and confronting.
Yet it is still only a snapshot of how serious the problems in swimming really are, because the scope of this review was limited to 2016-2021.
SWIMMER COACH RELATIONSHIP
An entire section was devoted to the relationship between coaches and athletes. In many cases it was likened to a parent-child relationship, where the coach is very much the dominating, controlling figure.
The real parents of many swimmers revealed how they had to place enormous trust in the coaches – sometimes with disastrous results.
“I will always wonder how I let this happen to my daughter. I should have spoken up, but instead I trusted the coach would help her realise her dreams. When she complained about her treatment, I told her: ‘This is the best thing for your swimming’. I now watch her in and out of therapy, battling an eating disorder … I think I ruined her life.”
Another parent said: “The coaching relationship doesn’t seem healthy. She is infatuated by (name) and whatever he says, she will just believe. Everything was based around him and pleasing him. It is commonly spoken among the team about how off it seemed. It looks like dangerous territory to her.”
At a national team camp, one coach was reported to “always answer the door in his towel”, which made female swimmers and staff uncomfortable.
Other swimmers expressed fears about speaking up, claiming that if they did they were derided as weak or mentally ill.
One swimmer who did lodge a complaint against a coach was told she was the one who needed to change her behaviour.
Others complained how some domineering coaches would control every aspect of their female swimmer’s lives, from what they eat, to how they cut their hair, to the clothes they wear, even to what they post on their social media accounts: “We were groomed to accept bullying as part of the culture.”
There were also numerous concerns submitted about coaches touching the bathers of swimmers, or constantly putting their arms around them, or standing directly behind them on the blocks when they were bent over, ready to dive in the pool.
WOMEN’S HEALTH ISSUES
“Often male coaches don’t want to discuss (menstrual) periods and would not want to understand the symptoms and discomfort that comes with periods. I have heard so many stories where coaches have just told girls to ‘suck it up’ and ‘it’s not that bad’.”
