Simone Biles took bronze on the balance beam. DANIEL STILLER/BILDBYRAN/ZUMA PRESS
With the recent publication of the Whyte Review we have been afforded an insight into the bullying culture that has been prevalent through the British Gymnastic (BG) set up for many years. The review highlighted that from over 400 submissions, 40% spoke about physical abuse, 50% about emotional abuse and a small number mentioning sexual abuse.
Sport should always be a welcoming and safe environment for all. That this culture was allowed to be fostered for so long is hard to hear.
The review reported that well-being and welfare of athletes and staff was not at the centre of the culture at BG and that these behaviours were allowed to continue due to a pursuit of excellence and competition success. The review continued to mention various factors which contributed to this culture of fear, including a coach-led environment where athletes were undervalued as individuals and were stripped as feeling like ‘whole’ individuals, a cultural disregard for the ‘athlete voice’ and such bullying that athletes felt unable to come forward due to a fear of de-selection, demotion or a loss of funding.
BG aren’t the only organisation who have been found to be guilty of bullying and abusing their athletes. With more and more athletes feeling empowered to come out with their stories, it begs the question; when are these archaic principles of coaching and culture to achieve success going to stop?
Sport psychologists have produced numerous pieces of evidence to suggest that best practices for helping athletes do not need to include these harsh, coach led environments. One of the reasons cited for the culture of fear within BG was the need to develop resilience in their athletes and a subsequent belief that resilience was the result of having an ability to suffer. However, this could not be further from the truth and is summed up eloquently in this quote from an article called ‘In the pursuit of Mental Toughness: Is Creating Mentally Tough Players a Disguise for Emotional Abuse?’:
“It is plausible that coaches may interpret the process of developing mental toughness as an invitation or encouragement to overlook ethical boundaries and be particularly harsh, uncompromising, or insensitive to the young athlete’s physical and emotional needs. It is possible that this could occur with or without an intention to do harm, ….the power imbalances between athlete and coach are such that young athletes often submit to unrealistic expectations and accept abuse while supressing their own feelings and thoughts…they become normalised and accepting of demands that were previously considered damaging or undesirable”
Resilience has actually been defined as a “dynamic process encompassing the capacity to maintain regular functioning through diverse challenges or to rebound through the use of facilitative resources” (Bryan et al,. 2019). In addition to this research has provided greater clarity on how resilience should be viewed in the sporting environment.
Kegelaers & Sarkar (2021) highlighted that resilience is:
- A dynamic process, not a fixed trait
- Is cultivated by design, not by default
- Is about how you recharge, not how you endure
- Relational and environmental, not solely individual
- Is about emotional awareness, not absence/suppression
Athletes are human and deserve to be treated as such. As athlete voices increase, hopefully we will begin to see a cultural move away from this hostile, coach led environment to ones where all sports foster psychological and physical thriving with well-being and welfare placed on equal footing with performance. Supportive and balanced environments can lead to just as much, if not more success than those where athletes are pushed to their very limits mentally and physically.