Surviving child sexual abuse in women's artistic gymnastics: ‘It's beautiful,because had I stayed in the past,I wouldn’t have evolved as a person’

Abstract

The USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal raised global awareness about child sexual abuse (CSA) in women's artistic gymnastics. The ensuing media coverage also centre-staged victims’ survivorship stories, a process that for many moved from dissociating, recognising and disclosing CSA to feeling comfort when connecting with survivors and accepting CSA as part of their life history. However, scholarship on what survivorship from CSA in sport entails, and importantly, what it means to athletes, is limited. In this article, we frame the survival of CSA using Arthur Frank’s socio-narratological conceptualisation of people being able to process the devastating consequences of a life-threatening and/or a life-altering event, and present the survivorship stories of two former gymnasts, Maria and Lucia (pseudonyms). For these two women, survivorship was facilitated by hearing others’ stories of sexual abuse, purposefully facing their CSA experiences and connecting with one another later in life to raise awareness about sexual abuse in sport. Thus, in addition to presenting Maria and Lucia's stories for the purpose of providing CSA victims with a survivorship narrative, we outline and reflect on the role hearing and telling stories have in CSA survivorship.

Introduction

When in September 2016 former women's artistic gymnast Rachael Denhollander publicly accused Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar of sexual assault, she did not realise the global impact her story would have. As the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal unfolded, increasingly more former gymnasts revealed that they too had been abused by Nassar. What the public statements demonstrated was the process of survivorship from child sexual abuse (CSA), which research has shown to entail dissociating oneself from the memories of CSA to recognising CSA experiences, disclosing CSA and feeling comfort by connecting with survivors and accepting CSA as part of one's life history (Chouliara et al., 2014; Guyon et al., 2020; Jeong and Cha, 2019; Naples, 2003; van der Westhuizen et al., 2022).

Scholarship on sexual abuse in sport is substantial and research on athletes’ surviving CSA is emerging (Gillard et al., 2022; Owton, 2016; Papathomas and Lavallee, 2012; Seanor et al., 2022). However, primary research data on what survivorship from CSA in sport entails, and importantly, what it means to athletes, is not available. Thus, the purpose of this article is to present the survivorship stories of two former gymnasts, Maria and Lucia (pseudonyms). The questions that guide this paper are: What happens to gymnasts after experiences of CSA in sport? What initiates and facilitates survivorship from CSA in sport? What does it mean to be a survivor of CSA in sport? To answer these questions, we have turned to Frank's (2013) socio-narratological conceptualisation of people's possibilities to process the devastating consequences that a life-threatening and/or life-altering event, such as CSA, causes.

Child sexual abuse in women's artistic gymnastics

Since Celia Brackenridge's (e.g. 1997; Brackenridge and Kirby, 1997) seminal research during the 1990s, research on CSA in sport has grown and knowledge is available on the prevalence and mechanisms of, and consequences for (child) athletes. Research estimates that the prevalence of CSA in sport is as high as 49% (Pankowiak et al., 2023). In terms of CSA mechanisms, research has established that (risk) factors at the individual, situational, cultural and organisational levels create ideal conditions for individuals willing to sexually abuse children: Gender and age differences in perpetrator and athlete (Fasting et al., 2013; Pankowiak et al., 2023); high training volume, isolated training location and the exclusion of parents (Brackenridge and Kirby, 1997; Gaedicke et al., 2021; Johansson and Lundqvist, 2017); hierarchy between coach as expert and athlete as learner, the normalisation of abusive behaviours and culture of fear and silence (Parent and Fortier, 2018); bystander effect (Verhelle et al., 2022); disregard of human/child rights and unsafe reporting mechanisms (Roberts et al., 2020; Schmidt et al., 2022; Solstad, 2019); and the grooming process (Brackenridge and Fasting, 2005; Owton and Sparkes, 2017). Research on the consequences of CSA in sport demonstrates psychological, cognitive, social, physical, educative, economic and spiritual impacts (Brackenridge, 1997; Leahy et al., 2008; Timon et al., 2022; Vertommen et al., 2018). These consequences may accumulate over time because of the negative feelings and dispositions that victims develop about themselves and the world around them (e.g. grief; lack of control; mistrust; self-blame) and cause re-victimisation (Kerr, 2022; Parent et al., 2022). Critical developmental periods, such as a romantic relationship or becoming a parent may trigger (further) consequences (Kerr, 2022), and delays in recognising the consequences of CSA risk re-victimisation (Kerr and Stirling, 2019).

Turning to CSA in women’s artistic gymnastics (WAG), research has emerged in response to the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal, with scholars focusing on the media representations and organisational shortcomings that facilitated Nassar's perpetration (e.g. Edelman and Pacella, 2019; Smith and Pegoraro, 2020; Way, 2021). Research on the prevalence of CSA in WAG is not available. The sexual abuse cases that have reached the public ¹ do allow the assumption that CSA occurs globally and at all levels of competition.

In terms of mechanisms, research shows that WAG entails many of the CSA risks. The young female gymnast population, as well as their positioning as learners that should obey, and the many male coaches that are afforded extensive control over the activities in and beyond gymnastics training, are particularly problematic (Barker-Ruchti, 2008; Barker-Ruchti and Tinning, 2010; Cavallerio et al., 2016; Pinheiro et al., 2014). Moreover, child gymnasts, especially if identified as talented, spend many hours training, some up to or even more than 30 h per week. A relocation to a regional and national training centre during childhood may also be required, which increases their isolation from home and social contexts, excludes parents from their daughter's sporting lives and increases gymnasts’ dependence on their coaches (Barker-Ruchti and Schubring, 2016; Jacobs et al., 2017; Salim and Winter, 2022).

Women’s artistic gymnastics research has also identified facilitating cultural norms, including the normalisation of a violent coaching model, coaches’ touch of gymnasts through supporting skill learning, revealing gymnastics attire and the sexualised movements the sport demands (Barker-Ruchti et al., 2020; Lang and McVeigh, 2020). Research further shows that gymnastics organisations fail to afford child rights and do not provide effective protection and reporting mechanisms (Cervin, 2020; Edelman and Pacella, 2019; Jacobs et al., 2017; Way, 2021). Way's (2021) research convincingly shows that in the Nassar case, the US Olympic Committee, Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics’ deliberate win-at-all-cost philosophy left gymnasts with no other choice than to endure the physical and psychological abuse that their national training context entailed. In this context of precarity, Nassar's benevolence and care groomed gymnasts (and often their mothers) to not recognise his perpetrations.

In terms of the consequences that CSA has for gymnasts, the present scholarship does not offer primary research data on how gymnasts process experiences of abuse. Before we now turn to Maria and Lucia's story of CSA survivorship, we turn to socio-narratology, specifically Frank's (2013) conceptualisation of how people are able to process the devastating consequences that a life-threatening and/or life-altering event, such as CSA, causes.

Conceptualising CSA survivorship

Socio-narratology, or the sociological perspective of how people live in a story-shaped world, conceptualises that stories construct experiences and identities (Polkinghorne, 1988). Stories are everywhere, and as we hear them, they guide us and afford meaning. For Frank (2013), stories do not only have a practical imperative; he regards stories as products of local circumstances that are formed anew as they are being received, integrated and (re)told. These stories are embodied – people are stories. This existential purpose and role, Frank (2013) argues, is particularly important for individuals who have experienced a life-threatening and/or life-altering event, such as an illness, injury or abuse. Hearing about others’ suffering, and telling stories of their own suffering, affords a lifeline out of darkness (Frank, 2013).

In focusing on how individuals experience illness, Frank (2013: 54) conceptualises that suffering begins by ‘being shipwrecked by the storm of disease [read injury or abuse]’. The storm wrecks the victim's expected narrative ‘because its present is not what the past was supposed to lead up to, and the future is scarcely thinkable’ (Frank, 2013: 55). For many CSA victims, the suffering that sexual abuse causes is all-consuming chaos (Harvey, 2000; Morrow and Smith, 1995), a narrative logic that Frank (2013), and others (Smith and Sparkes, 2004), have recognised in patients having been diagnosed with a serious illness or a life-altering injury or disability. In the chaos narrative, there is no narrative order. The patient/victim cannot put into words the suffering. The body is ‘contingent, monadic, lacking desire, and dissociated [and] it is often victim of dominating bodies, which make it the object of their force’ (Frank, 2013: 104). There is no way forward as the ship is wrecked and the route the ship was expected to sail is no longer possible.

Despite chaos, Frank (2013) and a growing number of scholars focusing on injury and abuse narratives (Anderson and Hiersteiner, 2008; Foster and Hagedorn, 2014; Gildea, 2021; Harvey, 2000), also in sport (Barker-Ruchti et al., 2019; Kuhlin et al., 2020; Smith and Sparkes, 2005), recognise that sufferers can process devastating consequences. Commonly, triggers initiate this processing, which Frank (2013: 117) proposes to be followed by a ‘searching for alternative ways of being ill [abused]’. In this quest logic, those suffering ‘accept illness [CSA] and seek to use it. What is quested for may never be wholly clear, but the quest is defined by the ill [abused] person's belief that something is to be gained through the experience [which] affords the ill [abused] person a voice as teller of her own story’ (Frank, 2013: 115; emphasis in original). CSA is no longer chaos; the logic of the quest narrative represents (and provides) a script to meet suffering head on. The rebuilding of the shipwreck becomes possible.

This last point, to face suffering head on as a quest journey, is argued to afford the sufferer ‘a voice as teller of her own story, because only in quest stories does the teller have a story to tell’ (Frank, 2013: 115; emphasis in original). In contrast to the chaos narrative, where the sufferer has no words to tell a story, the quest narrative allows for the narration of transformation through which the sufferer realises the physical, emotional and social consequences an illness (CSA) has. No longer is the body monadic, lacking desire and dissociated, it is communicative and dyadic, which allows the sufferer to connect with others and share self-stories to hold their own and to heal:

The wound is a source of stories, as it opens both in and out: in, in order to hear the story of the other's suffering, and out, in order to tell its own story. Listening and telling are phases of healing; the healer and the storyteller are one. The healing may not cure the body, but it does remedy the loss of body-self intactness that Cassell (2010 ² ) identifies with suffering. The sufferer is made whole in hearing the other's story that is also hers, and in having her own story not just be listened to but heard as if it were the listener's own, which it is. The illusion of being lost is overcome (Frank, 2013: 183, emphases in original).

The quest narrative, then, goes beyond the recollection of memories to inform others. It entails the responsibility ‘to witness the memory of what happened, and to set this memory right by providing a better example for others to follow’ (Frank, 2013: 133). Such testimonies of being a witness of suffering, in contrast to seeing suffering in others (such as witnessing a crime), are very important, because the embodiment of the suffering resists, on the one hand, the silence that is often associated with suffering from CSA (Harvey, 2000). On the other, testimonies offer victims not yet able to tell their story a narrative script. Here, Frank (2013: 182) adds that telling stories of suffering also means that the harm that was experienced becomes useful: ‘In the wounds of their resistances, they gain a power: to tell, and even to heal’.

Stories and storytelling's potential for survivorship are, then, significant and raises the question of how gymnast CSA victims, such as Maria and Lucia, become quest storytellers? With this question in mind, we now turn to Maria and Lucia, to outline how we have heard and constructed their stories of survivorship.

Hearing and reconstructing Maria and Lucia’s stories

Maria and Lucia's stories stem from the research project #gymnastalliance: An international study on women's gymnasts speaking out about abuse. Broadly speaking, the project aims to understand the speaking out process from the perspective of gymnasts who have, publicly or otherwise, disclosed their experiences of abuse. The study was designed as a trauma-informed qualitative research project (Barker-Ruchti, in press) and received ethical approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (Dnr 2020-06357).

To recruit research participants, a purposeful sampling strategy, with the sample criteria being current or former gymnasts who had since June 2020 anonymously or by using their name spoken out about abuse through social and/or traditional media, or other forums (e.g. lawyer/law firm; Ombudsman; reporting agency; public investigation into abuse; police), was adopted. Recruitment occurred through posting a recruitment call on the first author's Twitter account and forwarding the tweet information to individuals and organisations that were considered able to support the recruitment of research participants (e.g. WAG bloggers; journalists who reported on the #gymnastalliance movement). Through this call, 19 former gymnasts from 12 countries, aged 21–50, consented to participate in the study.

The research method used to hear gymnasts’ speaking out experiences was individual semi-structured interview using computer-mediated communication (Smith and Sparkes, 2016). An interview guide that was developed based on the chronological process researchers have demonstrated to lead up to victims speaking out about sexual abuse (e.g. Chouliara et al., 2014; van der Westhuizen et al., 2022) guided the interviews: (1) WAG career, retirement and life thereafter; (2) realisation that their or others’ experiences were/are abusive and the decision to speak out about abuse; (3) preparations to speak out, meanings of speaking out and reactions to speaking out; and (4) demands for change and hope for the future. Each of the four interview sections began with a broadly formulated question that invited the interviewees to recount their experiences. The chronology of the four interview sections seemed to naturally fit the women's experiences of speaking out.

Maria and Lucia's stories stood out from the interviewed women because they included survivorship from CSA in sport, a process that has received little attention. Maria and Lucia's interviews were 88 and 78 min, respectively, and the online interview recordings were transcribed verbatim. At the time of the interview, the two women were 40 and 50 years old. They were from the same country and had both participated in elite WAG during their childhoods and teenage years. Both were groomed and sexually abused by their respective male coaches at a young age. Maria's coach did not face any consequences while Lucia's coach was imprisoned. Both Maria and Lucia described how they dealt with their CSA experiences later in life, in response to triggers. The meaning making that followed included Maria and Lucia spending considerable time and energy on reconstructing their CSA experiences, telling their stories publicly, meeting one another and re-entering their national WAG community to raise awareness about sexual abuse in sport.

To reconstruct Maria and Lucia's survivorship stories, we drew on four of Frank's (2013) narrative conceptualisations: 1. Narrative beginnings before the storm of disease; 2. Narrative wreckage and chaos because of a life-threatening illness; 3. Testimony and witnessing because of hearing others’ and telling their own stories of illness and suffering; and 4. Quest narrative to make their illness and suffering useful. Using as many of Maria and Lucia's verbatim quotations as possible, and adopting a creative nonfictional writing style (Cavallerio, 2022), relevant interview data was organised using Frank's (2013) four narrative conceptualisations. Our choice to adopt a creative nonfictional writing style was inspired by Frank's (2013) argumentation that listening to and telling stories offer healing. As sexual abuse victims may not have words to tell their stories, we felt it vital to share Maria and Lucia's rich accounts of healing to offer other sexual abuse victims not yet able to tell their stories a narrative script, something that may offer hope.

The narrative organisation of Maria and Lucia's interview data generated four CSA survivorship ‘chapters’: 1. Maria and Lucia enter gymnastics; 2. Maria and Lucia experience CSA; 3. Maria and Lucia face CSA; and 4. Maria and Lucia re-enter gymnastics. In chapters 1, 2 and 3, Maria and Lucia's stories follow one another consecutively; in chapter 4, their stories are integrated as by then, the two women had met each other.

Maria and Lucia enter gymnastics

Maria starts artistic gymnastics at the age of six. Right away, the coaches recognise Maria's talent and place her in a select group that trains more hours per week than the girls in the other groups. Maria quickly progresses and by the time she turns nine, she becomes junior champion on her continent, a competition that was held 5 hours flight away from her home. Upon this success, she's selected into her country's national development squad. That's when everything changes: The number of training hours, the number of training days per year and the performance expectations and commitments. What follows are national tournaments, cups and intercontinental competitions. The financial burden on Maria's parents increases as it's them that fund their daughter's travels.

At the age of 12, after moving between several clubs, Maria enters Club Olimpico, where she spends the next four years of her gymnastics career.

*************************

Lucia starts artistic gymnastics at the age of four. Her sister is a gymnast, which makes it easy for her mum to take Lucia along. Lucia loves gymnastics and the club's coaches quickly realise that she has what it takes. Lucia initially trains at several clubs as facilities with an elite focus are rare in her country. Eventually, Club Excelencia, which she enters at the age of seven, provides a suitable training context. The coach Diego, a well-known former ballet dancer, coaches a group of young talented girls. Diego's wife, a gymnastics judge, is also involved in coaching the club's elite group of gymnasts.

Diego's skilled; he knows how difficult gymnastics skills need to be broken down to simpler exercises for the gymnasts to practice. The club's equipment is basic, but Diego's training methods are revolutionising. At competitions, the young group of increasingly skilled gymnasts catches people's attention. They’re going places. And everybody is behind the venture; the girls’ parents even buy better equipment to facilitate training.

Maria and Lucia experience CSA

Three coaches train Maria at Club Olimpico: The male head coach, his wife, who oversees balance beam, dance and choreography, and Hugo, their best friend, who's the assistant coach. Maria has a very good relationship with the three coaches. With Hugo, she feels protected. He provides emotional comfort and support.

Maria's success continues and the goal to qualify for the next Olympic Games becomes a target. Training intensifies, still, and the coaching style becomes gradually more uncompromising. Maria suffers several serious injuries. Operations to fix a couple and various public appearances to fundraise money complicate Maria's already demanding situation. The preparation phase to qualify for the Olympic Games at the world championships is relentless. There's no time for breaks. The pressures on Maria, her coaches and her federation intensify.

In training, Hugo more and more often entices Maria's performance by promising prizes for excelling. And Maria desperately wants to please Hugo. Her feelings towards Hugo are strong and infatuating. But there's also denial. Hugo sometimes gets mad with Maria because she's unable to perform to his expectations or when male onlookers offer her attention. It's confusing and Maria senses that something's off.

From about the age of 14, Maria lives and breathes gymnastics. She considers herself a gymnast on the path to the Olympic Games. She doesn’t need confirmation or reinforcement, she knows that if she can train as she does, she’ll qualify. She can’t do it without Hugo though. She needs Hugo, she can’t train well without him. And Hugo tells her that he needs her; he can’t train any other gymnast. At the age of 15, Maria qualifies for the Olympic Games. She's the first to ever achieve this for her country.

It's more often now that Maria finds herself in uncomfortable situations. It may be when her mum's late picking her up from training; it can be when training happens in a private gym where rooms can be closed; or it's when travelling to competitions, when Maria sits next to Hugo. It's in these situations that Hugo's actions move from encouraging phrases and gentle pats to intense glares, hand holding and secretive kisses. Hugo also starts to call Maria at home, on the pretence that he needs to check on her health and wellbeing. He's become part of her family and at times, stays with them at their summer house.

Maria starts to realise that while she needs Hugo's attention to perform in training, she doesn’t need this outside the gym. She doesn’t need his calls, nor his stays at her house. Others have also noticed their increasingly intimate relationship. Some even report Hugo's inappropriate behaviours to the head coach.

Maria doesn’t show her unease. She can’t, there's no time and anyhow, Maria doesn’t know how to express her feelings and confusion. It's easier to just continue to train, day in and day out and to become more guarded.

The Olympic Games are now approaching. At an international warm-up competition, Maria fractures a vertebra. Despite the pain, she competes the uneven bars exercise. She continues to train. When training at the Olympic event site, she suffers another injury to her vertebra, further displacing it. She temporarily loses the feeling in her legs. Maria is adamant that she can compete: ‘It's an Olympic Games, it's unthinkable that I can’t compete, I’m a robot, I may be injured, but the doctors can inject something, and I’ll be as good as new’. Even if it's going to be just the uneven bars, Maria wants to be an Olympian. However, a spine specialist is clear. With her diagnosis, continued training and competing is likely to have devastating consequences, and her parents don’t authorise Maria to stay in the competition. Neither does the head of her country's gymnastics federation. He wants to allow the substitute gymnast to compete.

The decision to pull Maria out of the competition has catastrophic consequences. With the substitute gymnast travelling to the Olympic event, Maria and Hugo are not allowed to remain in the Olympic village. They must find accommodation elsewhere, which during an Olympic Games, is impossibly difficult and expensive, but eventually, they find private lodging with a couple who are fellow country people.

What follows for Maria is daily sexual abuse at the private apartment her and Hugo are staying at. The nudity of her coach shocks her; the daily sexual situations are incomprehensible. He never penetrates her; Hugo's satisfied to introduce other parts of his body to Maria.

There's no place for Maria to go; no other person to be with; no cell phones and no possibility to see her family. There's darkness, desperation. She stops caring. To get out, Maria wishes to kill herself. At one point, she slowly crosses a busy intersection, only for Hugo to push her off the road to safety.

Upon returning home from the Olympic Games, Maria's unable to tell anybody about the abuse. Sexual abuse isn’t a topic that receives social or legal attention in her country. The only escape Maria can fathom is to forget what has happened. She makes a pact with herself to remain silent. The surgeries she must undergo to fix her back provide an accepted exit from gymnastics. At home, she takes down all the gymnastics photos from her bedroom wall. She wants to burn her past.

Yet, Maria knows that she's in denial; she knows that the abuse is wrong. But she increasingly questions whether the things she can remember happened like she recalls them. Plus, she knows that she did have something to do with it; not causing it, but as a manipulable and vulnerable person. This hurts a lot and Maria doesn’t know how to handle the frustration of feeling fooled. Maria resorts to restricting her diet; it feels good to gain some control.

20 years go by. Maria disappears from gymnastics and everybody she knows. She completes university education, marries and has two children. From time to time, she sees a gymnastics friend and occasionally, they talk. The friends sometimes ask about her relationship with Hugo, but Maria deflects and answers that they had a good relationship.

When Maria's six-year-old daughter Alicia starts to participate in a gymnastics sport, she doesn’t leave her daughter out of sight. When Alicia reaches regional and national tournaments, Maria starts to meet people who recognise her as the first gymnast of her country to qualify for an Olympic Games. Alicia starts to understand that her mother was a famous gymnast. Maria knows that people will question her about Hugo. She's doesn’t want these questions but she's adamant in wanting to support Alicia and protecting her from what has happened to her.

*************************

Diego organises his gymnasts into a ‘good’ and a ‘naughty’ group. Gymnasts not living up to Diego's expectations are sent to the naughty group, which means extra physical conditioning or cleaning the storage room. Diego loves the good gymnasts; he calls them his girlfriends. He kisses them on their mouths when they arrive at training or when he approves of their performances.

Lucia is 100% gymnast; she lives and breathes gymnastics. She doesn’t hang out with school friends; she feels out of place with them and anyhow, she doesn’t have time to be social. Lucia is Lucia-the-gymnast.

Lucia's often included in Diego's good group. From around the age of eight, the good girls get invited to Diego's home on Saturday mornings, before their afternoon training. The girls pile on the big sofa to watch gymnastics videos and Diego gives them food. His wife isn’t at home then and Diego instructs the gymnasts to keep their gatherings a secret.

The room they’re in is dimly lit. Diego doesn’t sit with the girls, he lies on another couch, away from the TV area. He wears a tight-fitting lycra costume and one by one, calls each girl over to lie on top of him. Now it's Lucia's turn. She lies down and Diego massages her body underneath the pink leotard she chose to wear for this afternoon's training. Diego's touching confuses Lucia, but she goes along with it. All the girls do. She knows that if she doesn’t, Diego would put her in the naughty training group on Monday.

When he's done, she goes back to join the girls on the big sofa. Lucia falls asleep.

Lucia's now nine. Training is going well. Today, after showering from a training session, Lucia's mum comes to the bathroom. Lucia notices that her mum has been crying and she wonders what's wrong. Lucia's mum asks her to sit on the stool and tells her that one of Lucia's fellow gymnasts has told her parents about what happens at Diego's house on Saturday mornings. Lucia's aghast with fear. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She tries to convince her mum that they have a nice time watching videos.

Lucia and her gymnastics teammates are called to a meeting. A woman and a man ask questions about Diego and the Saturday mornings and there's a recording device. Sometime later, Lucia is taken to another house. Her mum says that she must answer more questions.

Lucia is in a small room. A few people are there. Diego is seated behind a desk. One by one, her teammates are called, and they’re asked questions. When it's Lucia's turn to testify, she has to sit on a wooden bench. Her feet don’t reach the floor. When she talks, Diego looks right at her. Lucia is frightened.

10 years go by. Lucia continues training at a different club. She doesn’t speak about Diego and the Saturday morning visits to his house. Lucia develops her gymnastics career. She competes nationally and attends an international tournament. At the age of 22, she retires from gymnastics.

Maria and Lucia face CSA

The USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal exposing Larry Nassar hits Maria hard. Nassar reminds her of Hugo. As Nassar, Hugo had not been punished for his crimes for decades.

The Nassar case stirs discussions in her country. Other former gymnasts expose Hugo as a sexual abuser, and criminal offense complaints are being made. Sport organisations listen to abused gymnasts and promise to act. Maria realises that her country's reception to sexual abuse has changed from when Hugo had abused her. She asks herself whether her time to expose Hugo has come. She's for sure tired of avoiding the real reasons for dislocating herself from the gymnastics community after the Olympic Games. Yet, Maria's acutely aware that exposing her perpetrator isn’t enough; she must also begin to process her experiences of sexual abuse.

Social media helps Maria to become closer to current discussions. She's amazed at what people disclose and the empathy that people afford. As she increasingly joins in the debate, she feels encouraged and grows more confident. In some instances, Maria indicates that she has made similar experiences to those by the US gymnasts. She's now seriously considering public disclosure, although she doesn’t quite know yet in what way she might do this.

During the following year, Maria connects with individuals from her country's gymnastics community. Some had frequented her training facility and she wants to know what they had seen and how they had perceived her. Increasingly, she connects the dots, and her story completes with information she had forgotten or hadn’t known. She finally also speaks with her husband, telling him for the first time about her experiences.

Maria receives an invitation to a gymnastics reunion. Many former gymnasts attend. Lucia is there and they remember each other from the time when Lucia, a senior gymnast at the time, acted as Maria's ‘godmother’. Maria knows about Lucia's experiences of abuse at the hands of Diego, and she feels as though she can open to Lucia. The two connect; there's much understanding and empathy. After the reunion, Maria and Lucia stay in touch through social media.

And then, Maria knows that it's time to speak up. She calls Sebastian, the head coach from Club Olimpico, Hugo's best friend. She tells him everything, in great detail. Maria doesn’t blame Sebastian for Hugo's perpetration, but she wants him to know what had happened at the Olympic Games while he was coaching the substitute gymnast. She's clear with Sebastian: he's implicated, responsible, and she’ll make sure that he's held accountable.

Ten days later, on the exact same day of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games Maria should have competed in as a 16-year-old, she knows that the day has come. She tells her husband that she's going to speak with her parents. He tries to stop her, but Maria says that it must happen now. After an emotional meeting with her parents, she posts her story on Facebook, a text that she has been working on for some time.

As she presses the ‘post’ button, she knows that her story will reach many people and that it will take on a life of its own. But so be it. She wants her side of the story to be out, the way she wants to tell it. No more; no less.

Upon posting her story, Maria feels like the 16-year-old gymnast she once was – helpless and distraught. A hurricane of emotions sweeps her away, into the unknown. The tachycardia ³ that she had suffered because of the stress Hugo's abuse had inflicted, returns. As a mother of two children, she feels that she should be stronger, and not feel so out of control.

Following her Facebook post, Maria receives lots of messages, from relatives, former gymnasts, current coaches and many people she doesn’t know. Everyone thanks Maria for her post; some disclose their own sexual abuse experiences. Lucia also connects to express her shock and sympathy.

Maria feels inspired and motivated, and she's glad to have posted her story. Not to convict Hugo, or Sebastian and Sandra, but to tell her story and to make people understand why she had removed herself from gymnastics.

Maria's story is broadcast on national television and radio and shared on social media. She's happy that sexual abuse in gymnastics receives traction. And although overwhelming at times, the recognition, applause and empathy she receives tell her that her story's reaching many.

*************************

Lucia's now a university physical education student. She has also started to coach at a gymnastics club, but Lucia doesn’t like the atmosphere there. She doesn’t believe that to develop good gymnasts, she should disrespect the girls and ignore their needs. She leaves the club.

Lucia switches to studying psychology. She reads a lot and in a course on child psychology, covers child abuse. Lucia feels as though she's studying her own life. For the course's final exam, Lucia decides to apply the theory to her experiences of sexual abuse. When Lucia presents her story and analyses during the oral exam, the three teachers are shocked and extremely moved. And this is when Lucia understands: What Diego had done to her when she was eight and nine years old was abuse with a capital A.

Some weeks later, eating dinner at her parents’ house, while recounting her work on the final exam, Lucia mentions that she now understands that her memory loss is normal. This upsets her mum, and she says that sometimes, she questions whether putting her daughter through the witness confrontation at the age of 12 was the best thing to do. Her mother continues to describe the day, when she drove Lucia to the confrontation, the wooden bench she had to sit on, her feet not touching the ground.

Suddenly, Lucia remembers. The feeling of anguish; the wooden bench; his face; his eyes. After the meal, Lucia lies down on her parents’ couch in the living room and instantly, falls asleep. Just like that. Fast asleep. When talking to her husband later that day, she describes that falling asleep was what had happened to her and her teammates when at Diego's house on Saturday mornings. Lucia had assumed that Diego had put something in their drinks that would put them to sleep. But now, she's not sure. Maybe it was their way of protecting themselves?

Maria and Lucia re-enter gymnastics

Maria's offered a coaching job at her daughter's gymnastics club. She hesitates; coaching, or any other role in gymnastics, had never been an option. Too many ghosts. But now, Maria isn’t afraid any longer. She quits her professional career and accepts the coaching offer. She hopes that by becoming a coach, she can express to gymnasts the positive aspects of gymnastics, while preventing any bad ones. She also takes coaching courses.

Lucia is a psychologist and therapist and teaches several university courses. For the course in sport psychology, she proposes to the program director to add a module on abuse and prevention in sport. She invites Maria to present her story of sexual abuse.

Maria's presentation takes place in a full lecture hall. Her story shocks the students. They’re speechless. After the lecture, several students approach Maria and Lucia to thank them for the input. Several female students disclose experiences of sexual harassment and abuse and take up Lucia's offer for counselling.

Where possible, Maria and Lucia publicly talk about abuse in sport and prevention. They’re active on social media. Their and others’ stories continue to receive positive reactions. Together with people who can create spaces and awareness, they organise workshops on sexual abuse. It's not easy, but their talks with sport organisations provide further exposure and their demands for more prevention are starting to show results. Neither Maria nor Lucia is interested in talking to journalists who want to sensationalise the abuse that they have experienced. What they want is to change gymnastics. This is why Maria suggests to Lucia that they participate in the [project name; first author, in press] research study.

Maria and Lucia are content with how far they’ve come. They understand the magnitude of their victimisation; they wouldn’t wish it on anybody. But they feel at peace with it, and they recognise the strength they have gained. To Maria, it's beautiful, because she recognises that had she stayed in the past, she wouldn’t have evolved as a person so that she is able to pass on what she has learnt to their country's gymnastics community. Indeed, both Maria and Lucia are very happy to have regained their passion for gymnastics.

Reflections

Maria and Lucia's stories reveal that their CSA storms were caused by their respective coaches grooming and coercing them into sexual and genital acts while being entrapped by the perpetrator (Brackenridge, 1997). The abuse was for the coaches’ sexual gratification and was performed in an exploitative and manipulative manner entailing an exchange of privileges (Mountjoy et al., 2016; Stirling, 2009). Neither gymnast could provide consent nor resist the abuse. The individual, situational, cultural and organisational (risk) factors that researchers have identified to apply to WAG enabled Maria and Lucia's coaches to groom and sexually abuse them (e.g. Barker-Ruchti et al., 2020; Cervin, 2020; Jacobs et al., 2017; Pinheiro et al., 2014; Way, 2021). What was pronounced in their specific WAG environments were the exclusive groups Maria and Lucia were selected into, the parents’ long-term (financial) investments in their daughters’ WAG participation, the public recognition that Lucia and her teammates received for the advancements in their performances, and the pressure Maria experienced because she was the first gymnast in her country to qualify for an Olympic Games. These situational factors enhanced their respective coaches’ status and increased the gymnasts’ physical and emotional entrapment. Moreover, Maria and Lucia recounted that at the time of their CSA, their country tabooed sexual abuse (in sport) and no prevention measures existed. Consequently, most bystanders (except for a gymnast in Lucia's context telling her mother) did not recognise and/or report the abuse, and Maria and Lucia (and other gymnasts) were not being able to speak (out) about the abuse.

What Maria and Lucia's stories also demonstrate how their lives were affected by CSA. At the most intense points of the CSA storm, Maria experienced a state of severe chaos in the form of shock, entrapment and desperation. To escape this chaos narrative (Frank, 2013), she idealised and attempted suicide (Jeong and Cha, 2019). For Lucia, it entailed falling asleep when at her coach's house on Saturday morning. Upon exiting WAG, neither Maria nor Lucia saw alternative narratives available to that of the chaos logic, and repressive coping appeared as the only way forward. For Maria, she initially solved the chaos narrative with absolute silence and her withdrawal from WAG. For Lucia, she experienced dissociative memory loss, a condition that children sexually abused before the age of 12 commonly suffer (Jeong and Cha, 2019; Naples, 2003; van der Westhuizen et al., 2022). Maria's initial coping with the chaos narrative through staying silent and withdrawing from WAG changed as CSA consequences accumulated, a development that research has shown to be the case because of the negative feelings and dispositions that victims of CSA in sport develop about themselves and the world around them (Kerr, 2022; Parent et al., 2022). To gain some control over her chaos, Maria turned to restricting her diet (Papathomas and Lavallee, 2012). Additional reactions included memory doubt, self-blame and over-protective parenting once her daughter took up a gymnastics sport.

Yet, Maria and Lucia's chaos narratives turned. For Maria, the trigger came 24 years after her retirement from WAG, when the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal broke. For Lucia, the trigger came when 10 years after her coach Diego was imprisoned, she learned about child abuse in a university course. Importantly, both triggers provided Maria and Lucia testimonies of suffering that touched them (Frank, 2013). For Maria, the reporting on social media showed her what others disclosed, how positively people reacted to US gymnasts speaking out about Nassar's abuse, and how the perception of sexual abuse had changed in her country. For Lucia, the testimonies came in the form of child abuse knowledge. In response, both women began to comprehend their CSA experiences and in gaining words, they became able to order and give meaning to their experiences. Maria's initial tentative indications that she was subjected to sexual abuse demonstrate that she was beginning to connect with others (dyadic body, Frank, 2013) to communicate. Both Maria and Lucia were clear, however, on their responsibility ‘to witness the memory of what happened, and to set this memory right by providing a better example for others to follow’ (Frank, 2013: 133, emphasis ours). They invested significant time and effort to reconstruct their CSA experiences through speaking with WAG colleagues (Maria), using her story for the final university examination (Lucia), and preparing others on their imminent disclosure (Maria).

Eventually, the former gymnasts told their self-stories via a social media post and an oral presentation. For both, their speaking out fulfilled the three purposes Frank (2013: 140) sees in telling stories of suffering: ‘For the teller's reordering of her life story, as guidance to others who will follow, and to provide caregivers with an understanding of what the ill [abused] experience’. Through their testimonies, Maria and Lucia touched not only one another but also many others. The many positive messages Maria received, and the emotional reactions Lucia generated in her examiners, and eventually students, illustrate this. Their testimonies of having witnessed CSA (here in the sense of being a witness), restored their agency. They literally had something to teach, and it is here that Frank's (2013) argument of narratives of suffering being useful, applies. Not only because Maria and Lucia could make meaning of and develop from their CSA in WAG but also, and importantly, because their self-stories ‘guide’ people, whether ill or healthy [abused or not abused], lay or professional, in the moral commitments that illness [abuse] calls them to’ (Frank, 2013: 157). Indeed, the thinking with stories that Frank (2013) argues for, gives permission to those listening to be led in moral directions.

The two stories of survivorship presented in this article illustrate how existential hearing and telling stories are for CSA survivorship (Jeong and Cha, 2019). As Frank (2013: xx-xxi) writes: ‘In stories, the teller not only recovers her voice; she becomes a witness to the conditions that rob others of their voices. When any person recovers his voice, many people begin to speak through that story’. In Maria and Lucia's case, their stories gained traction as they met, and since sharing their stories publicly (at university and social media), in their country. Frank (2013) is vigilant, however, to caution from romanticising quest stories. He recognises that quest narratives ‘can implicitly deprecate those who fail to rise out of their own ashes’ (Frank, 2013: 135). Maria and Lucia never romanticised their stories or criticised others for not speaking out, and we have no such intentions either. We realise that some chaos cannot be risen above (e.g. Sparkes and Smith, 2008) and it is important to honour these stories. We further recognise that voice is never completely one's own; one's story is culturally shaped and can be disapproved. For Maria, the greater awareness of sexual abuse in her country provided an ‘appetite’ for public survivorship stories. For Lucia, who disclosed her stories 10 years prior to Maria, it was the university course on sexual abuse that provided a suitable context. For us, we hope that Maria and Lucia's survivorship stories afford others suffering with a lifeline out of darkness (Frank, 2013).

Conclusion

The purpose of this article was to present Maria and Lucia's CSA survivorship stories. Their stories provide primary data on the chaos that CSA in WAG causes and how it can be possible for gymnasts to make sense of and order their CSA experiences. Today, both Maria and Lucia comprehend their sexual victimisation and recognise that these experiences, and their efforts to transform, have allowed them to perceive their survivorship as ‘beautiful, because had I stayed in the past, I wouldn’t have evolved as a person,’ as Maria put it in the interview. We hope that by telling their survivorship stories, others – gymnasts, athletes, coaches, parents, officials, journalists, doctors, therapists, researchers, students and more – are touched to think with their stories.