Thank you, Madam Chair, for the question.
Many things have gone wrong. To your point about looking the other way, wilful blindness is very prevalent in sport, particularly in gymnastics. We are taught as gymnasts that there's no crying in gymnastics. Put a smile on your face even if your ankle feels broken or your back has torn muscles. Put on a smile and go out there and do your job.
You said it's natural to want to protect children. What I honestly feel has happened is that gymnastics has forgotten that these are children. Coaches use the language “I'm here to produce elite athletes”—“produce”. We don't “produce” children; we nurture them. We grow them. We teach them.
There is a very, to my mind, unfortunate and corrupt network of adults protecting adults. I can speak only to gymnastics specifically, but I have sat on both the provincial board of Alberta for gymnastics as well as the national board for Gymnastics Canada, and I have repeatedly seen friends protecting friends, information not coming forward, boards of directors who are uninformed, who know half the situation only, who rely on the narrative of a single person to inform them, and undoubtedly with that narrative comes not only a perspective but a desire to protect their friends and themselves and potentially their job. Yes, as adults in sport, we've all looked the other way.
As a parent, I was groomed. As an athlete, I was groomed. The worse grooming was as a parent, because I kept taking my child to gymnastics although she would come home and say, “Mommy, the coach hates me. The coach is mad at us. The coach yelled at us. Look at these burns on my skin I got from having to repeat a skill a hundred times over and over.” As trusting people, we implicitly think that these people are there, as you said, with a second nature to protect children, so at first you start excusing the behaviour because you would never dream there was anything different.