Category: safety

Dutch team enjoys a ‘healthy sports climate’?

UPDATE

The Dutch Federation has taken allegations very seriously.  And especially the admissions of Gerrit Beltman, now coaching in Singapore. 

Last week, the KNGU announced an independent investigation into all Gym Sports.  And urged athletes to report abuses to the Center for Safe Sports in the Netherlands. 

And now they’ve stopped the coaches of the current National Team from working with those athletes while the investigation is underway.  Gymnasts can still train, but not with their personal coaches. 

‘The stories are coming from all sides,’ KNGU chairwoman Monique Kempff told a news conference. ‘And if you want to make a cultural shift, you cannot take half measures.’

Read more at DutchNews.nl

___ original post from July 28, 2020 below:

Good news.  Things have changed for the better.

The current Team Netherlands supports their coaching system.

The statement can be read on the Instagram pages of Sanne Wevers, Lieke Wevers, Eythora Thorsdottir, Vera van Pol, Laura de Witt, Tisha Volleman, Sara van Disseldorp, Naomi Visser, Kirsten Polderman and Sanna Veerman. Céline van Gerner, who stopped last August, also shared the statement. …

“The past period has been an accumulation of sad news from the world of gymnastics. First internationally, but now also nationally. Our condolences go to everyone who has had negative experiences in our sport.”

“We do not recognize ourselves in the image that is now sketched of Dutch gymnastics with regard to the stories of the past. Where in the past there was room for physical and mental flogging, this is a thing of the past … 

National gymnastics team responds: ‘We do not recognize ourselves in the sketched image’

Netherlands at Doha 2018

statement from FIG President Watanabe

You have opportunity to report incidents to FIG alongside National reporting systems.

Watanabe:

In the wake of this (Nassar) affair, the FIG has established the Gymnastics Ethics Foundation to encourage anyone to report any form of rules violation, abuse and harassment, and to provide a safe, confidential mechanism to do so. www.gymnasticsethicsfoundation.org/safeguarding

The task was not easy, but today the Foundation is fully operational and is investigating several cases.

As well as any form of physical violence clearly being intolerable, insults and threats have no place in any training hall. …

Message from the FIG President

interview with one of Nassar’s victims

Sara Teristi … “first met Larry Nassar–the most prolific known sex criminal in American sports history–at a gym in Michigan in late 1988.

She was a young gymnast in a vulnerable state, she says, having been emotionally trampled by her hard-driving coach, John Geddert, a man who made her feel worthless.

Nassar, who was volunteering as team doctor, zoomed in on her right away. …

Today, she says she wrestles more with the psychological abuse of her coach than the sexual abuse of the doctor. …

An Early Survivor of Larry Nassar’s Abuse Speaks Out For the First Time

This piece is adapted from her new book The Girls: An All-American Town, a Predatory Doctor, and the Untold Story of the Gymnasts Who Brought Him Down, by Abigail Pesta. 

worldwide coaching culture in Gymnastics

The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) has been urged to hold a worldwide symposium “as soon as possible” to address the coaching culture within the sport in the wake of several abuse scandals.

In an open letter to the FIG, the Royal Dutch Gymnastics Federation (KNGU) expressed concern the culture portrayed in the Netflix documentary Athlete A is “not isolated but constitutes a risk for the entire world of gymnastics around the globe”. …

FIG urged to hold worldwide symposium to address coaching culture in gymnastics

the hydration fad

You know people who don’t go anywhere without their water bottle. They’ve become habituated.

hydration

It’s a fad. You should drink when thirsty. Benefits of hydration have been grossly exaggerated. That’s my opinion.

 Leave a comment if you feel differently.

Hyperhydration, rather than dehydration, may pose a greater health risk to athletes, according to two articles in a British medical journal. …

Misperceptions about dehydration have been driven in large part by marketing of sports drinks, according to Noakes, author of Waterlogged: The Serious Problem of Overhydration in Endurance Sports.

“Over the past 40 years humans have been misled … to believe that they need to drink to stay ‘ahead of thirst’ to be optimally hydrated,” he wrote. …

Too Much Water Bigger Threat Than Too Little

Waterlogged

The most recent (1996) drinking guidelines of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) propose that athletes should drink “as much as tolerable” during exercise.

Since some individuals can tolerate rates of free water ingestion that exceed their rates of free water loss during exercise, this advice has caused some to overdrink leading to water retention, weight gain and, in a few, death from exercise-associated hyponatraemic encephalopathy.

The new drinking guidelines of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), recently re-published in this Journal, continue to argue that athletes must drink enough to replace all their weight lost during exercise and to ingest sodium chloride since sodium is “the electrolyte most critical to performance and health”.

In this rebuttal to that Consensus Document, I argue that these new guidelines, like their predecessors, lack an adequate, scientifically proven evidence base. Nor have they been properly evaluated in appropriately controlled, randomized, prospective clinical trials.

Abstract – Drinking guidelines for exercise: What evidence is there that athletes should drink “as much as tolerable”, “to replace the weight lost during exercise” or “ad libitum”?

Dutch coach Gerrit Beltman admits abuse

This article is in Dutch.

I used Google Translate.

Beltman (64), still active as a coach … :

“The behavior I showed is in no way justifiable. I insisted on winning, at the expense of everything …

I am deeply ashamed now. Never have I consciously intended to hit, to curse, to hurt or to belittle. But it did happen….

… thought it was the only way to cultivate a top sport mentality. I blame myself for failing.” …

Gym coach Gerrit Beltman breaks silent about his inhumane training methods: ‘I mistreated and humiliated young gymnasts to win medals. I am deeply ashamed’

Recall that former Dutch gymnasts Stasja Köhler and Simone Heitinga wrote a book detailing the abusive training methods they endured as elite gymnasts. The coaches accused were Gerrit Beltman and Frank Louter.

The Dutch Federation responded but did not apologize, perhaps on the advice of lawyers:

We continue to call on all athletes of all levels to report to the Center for Safe Sports and / or the Institute of Sports Justice (ISR) if they have experienced undesirable behavior, both now and in the past. …

The Dutch Federation has also launched an independent investigation focusing on top athletes from the age of 12 who were active from 2013.

Beltman coached in Belgium and Canada, as well as Netherlands.

YOG Dakar delayed to 2026

SENEGAL AND THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE (IOC) HAVE MUTUALLY AGREED TO POSTPONE THE YOUTH OLYMPIC GAMES (YOG) DAKAR 2022 TO 2026.

The IOC and Senegal understand that this news will be disappointing for many young athletes. …

Khorkina / Russia in denial

My best guess is that of all nations in the world the gymnasts who suffered most were from the Soviet Union / Russia.

Most of what Khorkina says should be studiously ignored.

Prominent figures in the sport like Nellie Kim, Liubou Charkashyna, Liudmila Tourishcheva, Andrei Rodionenko, and Ksenia Semenova claimed in separate interviews that gymnasts are coming forward because they want attention or money and this is likely to discourage victims of abuse from coming forward. …

KHORKINA ON GYMNASTS SPEAKING OUT AGAINST ABUSE: THE JUST WANT FAME

Australian gymnasts speak up about past abuse

Click through to read the article on The Age.

https://twitter.com/ozgymblog/status/1285860440229048320