There has already been a great deal of powerful writing about the absolute debacle of the women’s Olympic Figure Skating competition this week, and as a child safety expert I compelled to add my voice. Based on what we know publicly, and saw play out on television this week, I am profoundly concerned about the abuse that many young girls are enduing in the quest to become Olympic champions.
Russian Olympic Committee coach Eteri Tutberidze presides over a system that chews up child-athletes and spits them out broken, even if they become “champions.” Doping, starvation diets, refusing the girls even water to drink during their competitions; the verbal berating of heartbroken Kamila Valieva after she fell in her long program. The quest for quadruple jumps is punishing and unsustainable. The Russian skaters from the 2018 Olympics have retired from competition, replaced with a fresh new crop of young girls. 2018 Gold medalist Alina Zagitova is currently only 19 years old. The race to complete quads can be a race against puberty: young, lithe, small, light skaters without body fat are at an advantage for jumping.
Rita Wenxin Wang reports in her must-read article,
Tutberidze has come to be regarded as the world’s leading expert in creating figure skating champions. Her methods are no secret. The Eteri girls talk openly about not being able to drink water during competitions. They do their best to delay puberty by eating only “powdered nutrients” or by taking Lupron, a puberty blocker known to induce menopause. They are subjected to daily public weigh-ins and verbal and physical abuse. And they compete while injured, huffing “smelling salts” while wearing knee braces and collapsing in pain after programs.
What has the response been to Tutberidze and her abusive methods? She received the International Skating Union’s inaugural Coach of the Year accolades in 2020—the first ever award is given to the purveyor of this system.
So while the doping scandal around Kamila Valieva brought all this to the forefront in the most dramatic way imaginable, the abusive system has been operating for years.
Have we learned nothing from women’s gymnastics and the abusive tactics of Marta and Bela Karolyi? It appears that we have not. The Karolyis’ repressive training regimen, with disgusting food in sparse quantities served at the isolated Karolyi Ranch training facility made the girls even more vulnerable to the predation of sexual-abuser Larry Nassar. As the team doctor, Nassar had access to the gymnasts and was not supervised closely. He groomed the hungry athletes with food—sneaking them treats in order to appear as a “friend” who was on their side.
We should know better by now, and we clearly don’t. The IOC, the ISU are complicit. The Russian anti-doping system is a joke—they took 6 weeks to process Kamila’s Dec 25 doping test results, creating the Olympic firestorm.
Who is there to advocate for these teenage girls, for their best interests? I don’t know enough about the entire system to suggest specific reforms, other than to say it clearly needs a total overhaul. In the meantime, as an emergency measure, I would recommend a minimum age requirement of 18 years old for international competition.
You may ask, does this relate to democracy? First of all, the treatment of the skaters is maddening enough that I would write about it anyway. And, it does relate to democracy, because the failure to respond swiftly and decisively to corruption is at the heart of what may make American democracy fail. What is Putin doing right now? Is he laughing at all of us, as he gets to watch Russian Olympians compete even in the wake of the national Russian doping programs that should have led to stronger bans? Is he loving the controversy, the media storm, distracting all of us, as he using the Olympics AGAIN as a cover for a possible invasion of Ukraine? Russia invaded Crimea during the 2014 Sochi Olympic games and in 2022 Putin is playing similar, dangerous games.
For strongmen and wanna-be dictators like Putin, and Trump, the only way to stop them is to bring actual consequences to bear on them. The system has to respond and hold them accountable. Actions include real sanctions: stop their ability to travel and do business through money laundering around the world. Cancel the NordStream gas pipeline. Apply the rule of law, with prosecution and swift serious and swift legal consequences for criminal activity. We are behind the curve on this in way too many places. Anti-corruption enforcement is our path forward to solve so many critical problems.
Thank you, Amy, for standing up for Kamila and other vulnerable young girls who are victims of the type of abuse you’ve described within Olympic Figure Skating. We all witnessed the anguish on Kamila’s face after she fell during her long program, and the harsh words that were hurled at her by Tutberidze, her coach. I, too, am unqualified to recommend specific reforms to the Olympics Figure Skating system, but as an educator, I know enough to say that we must ensure that there are strong safeguards in place to ensure that adolescents and young adults competing to become Olympic champions do not suffer abuse at the hands of their coaches and handlers. As to Russia’s role in all of this, some would say it is naive to worry about whether the media storm surrounding this event merely serves to distract us from a *possible* invasion of Ukraine, because Putin has already invaded Ukraine, right before our very eyes.
As I just posted on FB, we are complicit with our “oohs” and “ahhs,” essentially contributing to many sports becoming more extreme. Rewarding performance that takes away all balance, wrecking mental and physical health, is not a good trajectory. Not too far removed from doing anything to be thin, beautiful, etc.