Eating Disorders and Abuse

The last time I wrote, I talked about how coaches can affect an athlete’s diet. This isn’t the case all the time because a large majority of the time they are helping their athlete’s. However, there are some occasions they don’t and make things worse for the athletes.

For this blog, I am going to talk about how this is abuse on the coach’s part. According to the dictionary, abuse can be defined as treating a person or animal with cruelty or violence, especially regularly or repeatedly. I brought up the definition because it’s something that is helpful to know when we talk about a subject this serious.

Now a lot of people question how this is abuse towards an athlete. If a coach is continuously telling their athlete they need to lose weight or that they are too fat or even that they don’t look right, they are harming a person. They are treating a person with cruelty. Not to bring up if the athlete does lose too much weight, they can get hurt from being deprived of food which again is harming them.

I am going to bring up John Geddert again in this post because he relates to a lot of what we’re talking about. I discussed how he weighed his athlete’s in front of each other and now I’m going to continue off of that and talk about how that’s abuse.

First, Geddert made their weighing a game for himself. When I talk to my teammate about when she was weighed, she said that they were rewarded for losing weight. To me personally, that doesn’t seem right to be rewarded for losing weight as an athlete that’s supposed to be weighing and eating certain amounts. She also told me that if they gained weight they were punished and made fun of the rest of the week until they lost the weight they gained and more. Again, I bring up the definition of abuse because being made fun of by a coach about your weight is considered abuse. Being told you have to lose weight and more when an athlete is already working out over 24 hours in a week, isn’t healthy and is abuse.

Second, a lot of the girls who attend this gym are known for getting hurt and having injuries. I talked about how my teammate was in a full leg cast due to an injury from gymnastics and she said that she was called fat and that this injury is making her gain weight. She was also told how much she’s going to struggle to get back into the sport and probably wouldn’t be as good due to the weight gain. This is also abuse because again, he is treating someone with cruelty. He is being rude and continuously to these girls.

I use Geddert only as one example of many. McKayla Maroney, Olympic gold medalist in 2012, talks about how she didn’t eat in front of coaches at The Ranch Training Center. She mentions in the article below that “your coaches are just always watching you and wanting to keep you skinny”. She also mentions how she “would’ve starved at the Olympics” if the doctor at the time didn’t bring her food.

https://olympics.nbcsports.com/2018/04/19/mckayla-maroney-savannah-guthrie-larry-nassar-interview/

The very last point on this subject I’d like to make is that Jordyn Wieber is also in the article above and she was a gymnast of Gedderts. She says in the article that “they pressured us to stay thin”. Pressuring people is a sign of dominance and when you establish that then you prove that you can overpower the people below you. Pressuring athletes not to eat is abuse.