By Chip Le Grand
Former gymnasts Georgia Simpson, Olivia Vivian and Tain Molendijk.Credit:Mark Stehle
Georgia Simpson knew with sickening certainty as she was twisting and tumbling through the air that it was going to end badly. A part of her knew it before she even walked on the mat to start her routine.
The moment she crash-landed, she instinctively did what every gymnast is taught to do; get back up. But as she regained her feet, something felt all wrong. She looked down and saw why.
Her left foot was jutting out sideways at a horrific angle from her shin. The inside of her ankle was a mess of broken skin, blood and protruding bone.
The crowd who’d come to watch some of the world’s best gymnasts saw it too. Some looked away. If only they had witnessed what took place a short time before.
Simpson, an Olympic aspirant just months out from the London Games, told her team physio before her floor routine she was in a lot of pain. Her other foot, her right one, was bruised and swollen from what she later discovered was an undiagnosed stress fracture. She didn’t think she could do it.
She doesn’t know what conversations were had between the physio, her coaches and national coach Peggy Liddick, only that the decision was made for her. “I was advised that other girls have it worse and I should toughen up,” she says. It was the last time she ever competed.
Serious injuries are part of gymnastics. Yet, with the benefit of time away from the sport, Simpson knows the injury which ended her career should never have happened. She doesn’t blame the physio or her coaches; she blames a sporting culture in which child athletes have no power to speak against what they are asked to do.
“I held it inside for a long time,” says Simpson, now back in Perth after spending four years overseas.
“I was 17 and I needed to move on. But I look back now and that should have been cause for investigation.
Former gymnast Georgia Simpson sustained a horrific injury after trying to tell Australian team officials she was not fit to compete.Credit:Tony McDonough
“I’m the one who is jumping, I’m the one who is flipping through the air. Shouldn’t I have a voice and be able to say what I do and don’t believe my body is capable of doing?
“Our voices weren’t valued in that way. They had complete control over whether our body was fit to do something or not.”
Gymnasts are finding their voices now.
A Human Rights Commission report commissioned by the sport’s governing body, Gymnastics Australia, identified systemic issues of misconduct, bullying, abuse, harassment and assault, the acceptance of negative and abusive coaching and a “culture of fear and control” instilled by coaches over their athletes.
It is not a rap sheet of rogue practices in the sport, but an examination of its norms. The report was not limited to women’s gymnastics but it is here, where the athletes are younger and the power imbalance between athletes and coaches greater, that the culture and practices are potentially, so damaging.
The Australian gymnastics scandal is not about predatory monsters like Larry Nassar, the US national team doctor at the centre of the Athlete A documentary which exposed the sinister side of gymnastics in America. It is not about evil, sadistic coaches. It is about something more insidious, accepted and rationalised.
‘I’m the one who is jumping, I’m the one who is flipping through the air. Shouldn’t I have a voice and be able to say what I do and don’t believe my body is capable of doing?’
Put simply, Australian gymnastics for the past 30 years has accepted fear, punitive training, ostracisation and a reckless attitude towards injuries as legitimate methods to turn children into Olympic athletes.
Julia Murcia, a former gymnast who, since the broadcast of Athlete A last year has been working with other gymnasts who trained at the now disbanded high-performance program at the West Australian Institute of Sport to bring to light the abusive culture they experienced, says part of the problem is the sport’s myopic focus on the Olympics as the only measure of success.
Ann-Maree Vallence, another former gymnast, says it is all about control.
To understand this, you need only read a letter to a young gymnast written by Liddick, the national coach of women’s gymnastics for 20 years and one of the most influential figures in Australian gymnastics.
Liddick, a highly credentialed coach who had previously worked with the world-beating US Olympic team, wrote a letter in November 2002 to Sarah Lauren, a 15-year-old gymnast who quit the sport just as Liddick had pencilled her into her next Olympic team.
The letter was posted to Lauren’s family home in Perth. Her mother Margaret-Anne remembers the day she came home from work to find her daughter on the floor, sobbing, after having just read it.
“She handed me the letter. I was furious.”
Liddick’s fury is clear enough from the typed pages. She began by saying she wasn’t going to try to talk Lauren out of her decision. She then castigated and shamed her for making a decision, without consulting her, that she believed wasn’t hers to make on her own.
Lauren had returned home from winning two gold medals at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester. Liddick wrote she was fooling herself if she thought she had achieved anything in gymnastics. Liddick did not accept that, having made it onto the national team, Lauren was entitled to quit the sport two years before the Athens Games.
“It is not only YOUR decision to make,” she wrote. “I cannot produce a successful team with only one or two gymnasts.
“I know, at 15 years old, you want an opinion about your future, this is normal. You must take the advice of the experienced people around you, being an Olympian will open so many doors for you later on when searching for your career path. No academic record cannot (sic) replace having that ‘Olympian’ on your resume.”
What Liddick didn’t understand is that going to the Olympics was not Lauren’s dream. She felt proud to have gone to the Commonwealth Games but, after competing in Manchester with cortisone injections in an injured ankle and undergoing another round of surgery, she’d had enough.
Former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar was jailed for life for sexually abusing athletes in his care.Credit:AP
“The difference between myself and others around me at that time is everyone’s identity was wrapped up in gymnastics and mine wasn’t,” Lauren explains. “I knew there was a life outside of gymnastics. I wanted to be educated, I wanted to be able to have a career.
“When you look at the language in that letter, you are almost a possession to them; a chess piece they can do what they want with to get the end result.”
Lauren says she never regretted her decision. She studied commerce at the University of Western Australia and now runs her own finance and accounting business and is raising a family.
Peggy Liddick declined to respond to questions from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
The treatment of gymnasts is a national and global sporting scandal. The Australian Sports Commission apologised on Friday to former gymnasts who were treated inappropriately. Gymnastics Australia has acknowledged the abuse, apologised for it and pledged to implement all recommendations from the Human Rights Commission report.
Before the report was released, the West Australian Institute of Sport was already facing its own reckoning from former gymnasts who have gathered testimonies from 57 women and men who trained at the Perth-based institute. They are negotiating with the institute and Sport Integrity Australia, a government agency run by former Australian Federal Police detective David Sharpe, to establish an independent investigation.
Tain Molendijk, a former gymnast who was so riddled with anxiety, she used to go into the toilets in the gym and bang her head against the wall.Credit:Tony McDonough
Sharpe declared the Human Rights Commission findings will change not just gymnastics, but Australian sport. WAIS chief executive Steve Lawrence, a sports scientist and administrator who has worked at the institute for 36 years, says the institute needs to understand what happened and why.
“Nowhere in my headspace did I think these sorts of allegations would be raised against the WAIS program,” he says.
Not all former Australian gymnasts believe they were treated badly by their sport. Some only realised it years after they stopped competing. Like survivors of child abuse, they endured the damaging aspects of gymnastics culture in silence and isolation. Tain Molendijk, a squad mate of Simpson’s at the West Australian Institute of Sport, says it took a degree in social work for her to understand that what she went through was normalised abuse.
‘I would never, ever let my child do gymnastics.’
Molendijk’s time in gymnastics was riddled with anxiety about doing the skills required in elite gymnastics and self-loathing for feeling that way. At the age of 13, she would lock herself in the toilet cubicle at the Perth Superdrome, where her squad trained, and bang her head against the wall.
“I was told that I needed to stop being crazy, that I needed to get out of my head and stop being so emotional,” she says.
After she quit gymnastics to become a circus performer, Molendijk was diagnosed with anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorders.
“The relationships that I got out of gymnastics and, in a way, the discipline, are two things I am really grateful for,” she says. “But I would never, ever let my child do gymnastics.”
The controlling, authoritarian approach to gymnastics, an approach adopted by Australia from former Eastern Bloc regimes and China, had disturbing manifestations. One of these was an obsession with the weight and body fat of girls as young as eight and nine.
Lawrence started working at WA Institute of Sport as a sports physiologist and taking skin fold measurements of pre-pubescent girls. He says the data collected showed there was no valid reason to do it with girls so young and the practice was ceased. At the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, skin folds were used by former national coach Ju Ping Tian as a criterion for Olympic selection.
Tracey Gartner, a gymnast who dedicated her career to making the 1992 Olympic team, says a failed skin fold test ended her dream. When her measurements exceeded the maximum, 40 millimetres of body fat allowed on a female gymnast, she was excluded from the final Olympic trial competition. She was 15 years old.
“That was extremely traumatic and unfortunately shaped my life,” she says.
“There was so much invested by myself and my family, not only emotionally and physically but also, financially. All of that wasted because of this discrimination, as the team selection wasn’t solely based on skill.”
Olympic gymnast Olivia Vivian says the toxic culture she experienced in the sport.Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui
Olivia Vivian, a former gymnast who says she was one of the “skinny girls” in her training group, remembers the anguish that daily weigh-ins and regular skin-fold tests caused some of her friends.
She says it felt as though, through over training and undernourishment, the sport was trying to keep them in a pre-pubescent state.
“I remember a lot of my teammates crying, the dreading of skin folds every two weeks and not a lot of support. Puberty is something that is totally natural and it was almost seen as something negative.”
Olivia Vivian at the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games.Credit:James Brickwood
The sport’s cultural attitude towards injuries is also disturbing. Jamison Ruscoe is a physiotherapist who specialises in treating gymnasts. She is also a former gymnast who spent much of her career injured. She is appalled at how gymnasts were pressured to train and compete when injured and marginalised if they couldn’t.
“The coaches wouldn’t really talk to you until you were better,” she says.
“The other girls weren’t supposed to talk to you. We called ourselves the cripples. You just stayed out of sight.”
At other times, risks were taken with injured athletes in full public view.
On the final night of the 2017 national championships in Melbourne, Emily Little had a horrific fall. Performing her floor routine, she mistimed a tumbling run and landed on her head with her neck bent at a dangerous angle. For a terrifying moment, Little couldn’t move at all. Then she felt an electric tingling in her fingers and toes.
In any other sport, if an athlete was injured in this way and experiencing these symptoms, competition would cease while the athlete was attended to, immobilised and stretchered into an ambulance. Instead, after a brief assessment by a physio, Little was told to get to her feet and present to the judges.
“If you don’t present to the judges your routine doesn’t count,” Little explains.
“This is the problem with the culture. It is bred into us that as soon as you fall, no matter what, you get up and you keep going. I definitely should have been told not to move. I wasn’t given a neck brace or a stretcher. I was given a towel around my neck.”
Little walked on wobbly legs to acknowledge the judges. She was then taken behind a curtain and examined by a doctor. It was at first suggested she fly home to Perth and get treatment later. Eventually, it was decided she should go to hospital that night. She was driven there after stopping at her apartment to pick up some things.
At the Alfred Hospital, the triage nurses quickly put her in a protective neck brace and made her lie down. She woke up the next morning in a halo brace used for critical spinal injuries and underwent the first of two surgeries to repair her broken neck. She was told she came perilously close to becoming a quadriplegic or worse. She never returned to the sport.
“It is like your health and safety isn’t the number one priority,” she says.
“I felt Gymnastics Australia’s image, with me walking off the floor being fine, was more important than me laying there and getting the help I needed.”
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