ADVICE and support

It can be difficult to know where to look when you need support to deal with challenging situations. There is so much information out there that it can sometimes feel overwhelming. We have worked with Integrative Therapist and former GB gymnast Kay Salisbury to develop these resources, which we hope provide a good place to start for anyone who feels they could use some guidance on their path to healing.

We have also compiled some free-to-print wellbeing resources for children, which you can find here.

If you are viewing our site on your smartphone, we recommend turning your screen around to a landscape view to scroll through our resources slideshow.

We cannot emphasise enough that it is not one specific comment, one specific strike, one specific incident of punitive punishment or humiliation that we are referring to when we talk about emotional and physical abuse in gymnastics.

Instead, it is the cumulative effect of sustained, long-term, weekly, daily and hourly negative feedback; the surveillance and control of every move, the routine humiliation and bullying that happens over years, that causes the damage - leaving the gymnast with the feeling that they are useless and not worth listening to. 

Through these coaching practices, gymnasts are made to feel as though they deserve the abuse, because they are inherently deficient, falling well below the standard the coach considers acceptable. This is why they do not report their abuse. They have been socialised into believing that their experiences are insignificant, and are proportionate to the inadequacy of their performance.

From day one, gymnasts are not gifted the agency or credited with the intelligence to judge the standard of their own performance. Instead, the gymnast is held hostage in an unequal power game, where their self-esteem and sense of self lies entirely in the hands of the abusive coach - rendering the gymnast unable to identify the magnitude of their mistreatment.

Often it is only in later life, when the gymnast is far removed from the training context, that the trauma caused can resurface. Even then, correctly naming what happened to them as abuse can be challenging. The gymnasts instinctively attempt to detach the impact of the coach’s behaviour, and dismiss their feelings of low self-worth as originating in their own character - as opposed to being rooted entirely in the abuse. The resources on this page have been curated as a way to help gymnasts and former gymnasts to identify some of the common issues that persist in later life.

charities, Helplines and support groups