Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to this committee.
This feels like a watershed moment for sport, particularly gymnastics.
When you think of gymnasts, picture little children six to eight years old starting their competitive journeys, training 20 to 30 hours every week, oftentimes spending more time with their coaches than their parents.
These are the profoundly vulnerable little humans entrusted to coaches who promise to teach them to flip and fly. These are the children I speak for today and for whom we call upon this government and this committee to enact a judicial inquiry into human rights violations against athletes and a lack of mechanisms protecting children in Canada.
As a former gymnast myself, and mother of a former gymnast, I know the beauty and the potential benefits that sport offers if delivered with an ethic of care and a child-centric approach. However, the hundreds of reports we have received and the arrests made in the last seven months alone confirm our worst fears: Gymnastics is rotting from the top down and the bottom up.
I wonder how many of you would choose gymnastics for yourself or your own child if you knew what we do.
When you were a child, would you have chosen to repeatedly feel your physical safety was threatened by an adult bullying you to do dangerous skills that you knew could result in catastrophic injuries?
How many of you experienced a trusted coach pressing your legs into oversplits while you sobbed and begged for them to stop, but they just screamed at you to “shut up”?
Who here spent the prime of their life with their face stuck in a toilet bowl throwing up every meal? Who obsessively weighed themselves or were force-fed in hospital to treat an eating disorder, all the while with the soundtrack in their head repeating, “You're fat. You're too ugly to be a gymnast. You look like the Pillsbury Doughboy”?
How many of you have experienced confusion, nausea and panic when a trusted adult suddenly says, “I want to touch you”, or you had to choose between the safe haven of your sexually abusive male coach just to be spared from the outright cruelty of your female coach?
Have any of you lived in chronic pain since adolescence? Have you self-harmed because the voice in your head said, and maybe still says, that you're worthless, useless, lazy?
Lastly, imagine spending thousands of dollars on therapy just to become a functioning member of society.
Our Gymnasts for Change team is here today. My friends, how many of us can relate to these examples?
You are all standing. Stay standing, team, if the pain, misery and fear you endured as a child athlete was worth the medals you won.
This is a reality for many child gymnasts in Canada—violence, degradation, humiliation and some of the worst abuses you can imagine—yet still there is no plan for prevention.
Let’s remember that the lack of diversity in gymnastics means these are often the most privileged children in our communities. If we can’t even keep them safe, what does this mean for kids who are racialized or transgender, or who have a disability—children who are exponentially more vulnerable to maltreatment because of intersecting systems of oppression?
As awful as these examples of abuse are, survivors tell us time and again that what haunts them the most is not having been protected by the adults who had the power to do something, and who instead chose to protect their friends and the brand.
Gymnasts for Change Canada was a movement we hoped we'd never have to start. Collectively, we believed that if we informed the provincial governing bodies, Gymnastics Canada and, as a last resort, Sport Canada, somebody—anybody—would listen to us. They would act with haste to protect athletes. However, we were wrong. Nine other countries have already completed independent investigations into their gymnastics programs. They are two years ahead of Canada with efforts to dismantle these cultures of cruelty with legislative changes and binding mechanisms that protect athletes' human rights.
Let me be very clear: What we’re discussing today is not a sport crisis: It is a human rights crisis happening in sport. Canada needs leaders with strong moral courage who will call for a national judicial inquiry to uncover a past that must never be repeated and to generate solutions that have never existed. The time for bold and brave action is now. Every child in Canada deserves to enjoy sport and grow up to be a better person because of their sport experience, not despite it.
I ask this committee, how can we continue to hear these stories and not act?
Thank you so much.