So I just watched Athlete A on Netflix - doco about Larry Nassar and the sexual abuse cover-up in USA gymnastics - and found it extremely heartbreaking but also revelatory for my own life. All the talk of abuse here lately has made me examine things that I haven’t really thought about for years. And this is actually hurting me right now.
I’ve mentioned before about my swimming coach. He coached me from the age of 8 until I graduated high school at 16. From learning to swim in the local pool I eventually became a National age medallist and a member of elite squads as a young teen. I was determined to make it to the olympics (spoiler: I didn’t, LOL). I was a born overachiever and swimming is a very tough sport. Even from a young age, pre-teen, there is always someone training harder than you. By the age of 9 I was training before and after school five days a week.
The coach was a young man in his twenties. He had been a swimmer and his dad was a notoriously tough coach. My coach didn’t make it big and had settled for coaching the local squad in my home town. I was the breakout star of his small squad - a big name in our small town. I started making headlines and getting attention from talent scouts. My coach boasted and basked in my achievements. He made a bad rep for himself in the national swimming community for being arrogant and rude. Other coaches had multiple olympians in their squads and mine was small potatoes in comparison, but he thought he was a big shot.
He used me to gain glory for himself. He would push me to the point of physical injury and mental breakdown and then accuse me of lying about being hurt. He isolated me from the rest of the squad and made me train privately with him where we were the only two people in the pool complex at 5:30 in the morning - a 25-year old man and a 12-year old girl. He would assign me a main set, knowing it was just beyond the limits of what I could achieve, and yet I would deliver, because I didn’t feel that saying no was an option. Then, after watching me cry or vomit following the set, he would tell me that it was actually just a warm-up set, and there was a more difficult set to come. And still, I would do it. I became pretty good at sprinting laps while sobbing and choking on water. I was just a child of 12, 13, 14 years old.
So I was conditioned to believe I had no voice and no choice. I brushed off my mum’s concerns at the time because this was my dream and I wasn’t about to give it up. My schoolwork suffered in my senior year of high school. I wasn’t allowed to go to parties because I always had training the next morning. I never tasted alcohol until my graduation. My family couldn’t go on holidays because I couldn’t be out of the pool for a week. I began having nightmares about drowning in the pool and the town being flooded. Even years later, when I was in my twenties and had retired, I still had nightmares. One in particular I screamed at the coach “you can’t tell me what to do anymore!”
This is the part of the doco that stood out more than anything:
“You know, in other sports, the athletes are adults. They can reasonably make choices about what they want... these kids go to national training centres when they are ten years old. They are abused and mistreated for years, so even by the time they’re of age, the line between tough coaching and child abuse is blurred. So then when real, obvious abuse [like sexual abuse, fortunately nothing of the sort in my case] happens, you already don’t believe your own take on things.”
I know on the scale of abuse, my experience doesn’t rank that seriously. But what happened to me went beyond tough coaching. It was child abuse. In the literal sense of the word as I shared with May - the improper usage of a thing in order to gain benefit. The exploitation of a power imbalance for personal gain. It goes a long way toward explaining why I allowed myself to stay in an increasingly abusive relationship ten years later.
Once I burned out after graduation, the coach moved away to become an assistant coach at a larger, more prestigious program. He was still using me to pump himself up though, and after hearing all about my achievements, the head coach eventually contacted me and convinced me to give swimming another shot. He believed I was too young and too talented to retire. I moved out of home at 16 and boarded with a family an hour away from home. My old coach couldn’t accept that he didn’t have control over me anymore. He would approach me during training when he was supposed to be coaching the juniors. Eventually I told my new coach that I wasn’t comfortable with it and he took me very seriously - old coach was fired from the program. The last I heard, he dropped out of the swimming community altogether and left the country.
I’ve never shared this before but it helps to write it all down and reflect. The doco left me in tears, but some of those tears were for myself.
