Abuse in gymnastics is still “systemic” nearly two years after a damning report into the sport’s culture, coaches have claimed in a new documentary.
Gymnastic professionals and former athletes who appear in Gymnastics: A Culture of Abuse, which airs on ITV on Thursday night, say that bullying continues to be normalised by coaches and that safeguarding officers are still “overwhelmed” by complaints.
“Today on the day of recording, right now, in a gym right now, some kid is being verbally abused, physically abused, God forbid it, sexually abused,” Carlton Webster, a Crawley-based gymnastics coach, says at the start of the film. “Today. Fact.”
It follows the publication of the 306-page Whyte Review in June 2022, which found that young gymnasts had been weight-shamed and suffered psychological trauma and even physical injuries. The report received more than 400 submissions from across the country, with more than 90 clubs and 100 coaches mentioned by gymnasts.
Testimony included instances of gymnasts being denied food and water and access to the toilet during training and one seven-year-old girl who had to endure a coach sitting on her to increase a stretch. Although the documentary features testimony from victims of sexual assault, Whyte did not find sexual abuse systemic.
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“The culture in British Gymnastics [BG] has not changed one iota since the Whyte Review,” Webster, who has been coaching for 12 years but is not a BG member, told The Times. “Is there bullying going on still? Yes. Are there still gymnasts who are upset and calling us? Yes. Are there coaches concerned about the coaching at the top level? Yes. 100 per cent.
“We still have the brave ones calling us but I would speculate that’s probably 10 per cent. The culture is so fearful, coaches don’t want to speak up, gymnasts don’t want to speak up. You can imagine in an Olympic year, everyone’s gonna go proper quiet because they know if they ruffle BG’s feathers during the build up to the Olympics, they’re not going to get selected. If you [a coach] can get BG a medal, they will let you get away with blue murder.”
Claire Heafford, who experienced physical and emotional abuse as an elite gymnast training in the 1990s, went on to found Gymnasts for Change, a charity aiming to change the culture of the sport, and also appears in the documentary.
She told The Times that none of the coaches named in the Whyte Review had been banned since its publication. According to the British Gymnastics website, three coaches have been sanctioned since June 2022, two expelled with criminal convictions and one given a two-year minimum sport-wide ban for safeguarding concerns.
“Amongst the gymnastics community I’m not aware of anybody who’s had a satisfactory outcome,” Heafford said. “Abusive coaching practices are so normalised in the sport that the coaches are still insisting they’ve done nothing.”
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British Gymnastics has doubled the number of safeguarding officers handling complaints to 12 by recruiting from police forces and local authorities, as well as spending more than £1 million a year on welfare, double its expenditure before 2020.
“I’m still hearing from the investigating officers that they are utterly overwhelmed,” Heafford said, “One of them that I spoke to … said, ‘When I was in Norwich police, a heavy caseload for me was 15 cases, now I’ve got at least 30 and there’s still a pile of 300 that haven’t been looked at.’ ”
The documentary reveals parts of an email sent by David Kenwright, head national coach for women’s artistic gymnastics, after the successful World Championships in 2022, which said: “For all the knocks, setbacks, disappointments, the attacks on professional and personal integrity, the naysayers and the nonbelievers, this one fact remains. We overcame it all.”
Heafford said: “He’s painting whistleblowers who are reporting legitimate safeguarding concerns around athlete protection as naysayers. This is the national coach. It shows a total failure to understand what abusive coaching is what poor practice looks like. ‘Success is the best revenge.’ The best revenge for what?” David Kenwright apologised for the letter but remains in his role.
In November last year, British Gymnastics created new rules banning coaches from weighing gymnasts and specifying that only gymnasts over the age of ten could be weighed, with parental consent by a sports science or medical practitioner. It also frequently shares information on social media, signposting gymnasts to recognise and report abuse as part of its #BeTheChange campaign.
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Beneath one such recent post, a commenter wrote that she had reported abusive behaviour to a competition organiser before, only to be told it was not her club or her gymnast, so it wasn’t her business.
Daren Norman, a gymnastics coach of 40 years who also features in the documentary, told The Times: “The entire management structure requires new individuals in order for the organisation to rebuild trust with its members, despite all their glossy brochures and actions. It is concerning that the current leadership continues to support individuals in positions of power who perpetuate a culture of abuse.”
A spokesman for British Gymnastics said that they had offered to speak on the documentary but were denied the opportunity. As a result, they have not seen the film but understood that most of the victims are speaking about historic cases of abuse reported in the Whyte Review.
He said the report did not investigate individual claims but was “an information-gathering exercise that was about cultural and systemic issues” with an aim to making recommendations for the sport, not a list of coaches or clubs which needed to be banned.
The spokesman emphasised that British Gymnastics has been taking seriously the issues raised in the documentary for the past four years. He said the case backlog still exists, although it is being reduced, but that it should never be zero, as that would suggest abuse is not being surfaced.
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Gymnastics: A Culture of Abuse? will be broadcast on ITV1 at 9pm on Thursday
