Denied meals, locked in rooms: Olympic champion Michelle Ford’s swimming hell
Olympic champion Michelle Ford has opened up on the toxic culture that was prevalent in Australian swimming for half a century before the current generation of Dolphins spoke up.
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Former Olympic champion Michelle Ford has revealed fat-shaming and misogyny was rife during her swimming career in the 1970s and 1980s, with female athletes denied meals on flights, locked in rooms and forced to sleep in tiny cheap motel rooms while male counterparts lived in beachside luxury.
Ford’s revelations in her new book — Turning the Tide — highlights the toxic culture for Australian swimming has been prevalent for half a century before the current generation of Dolphins spoke up in an independent investigation into body image issues that finally prompted major change in the pool.
A teenage superstar of the pool, Ford recalls women being forced to stay at different motels where they would share a 3m x 3m room with a teammate during a camp, while the men stayed in beachside hotels.
But it was the death threats for attending the boycotted 1980 Moscow Olympics, and shocking treatment on her journey to those Games, that remains foremost in her mind.
It was on the Qantas flight to Frankfurt where female athletes were virtually starved for 40 hours on their way to a staging camp in Vittel, flight attendants told not to give the women the full meals being enjoyed by the male swimmers and coaches.
“In my mind, the journey was sorted, settled and nothing to fret about — until mealtime,” Ford wrote.
“When the trays came round, there were no bread rolls and the obvious carbohydrates, like potatoes and dessert, had been removed. Protein was served. The girls looked from side to side and noticed that the boys and staff had the lot.
“We asked the crew if we could have something more and were told that they had been given strict orders not to serve us.
“We didn’t understand at first, and then realised that they only meant us, the girls. Denied the liberty of a night out on previous trips, we were now denied a decent, rounded meal.
“The obsession with diet had gone too far, we thought. As the hours ticked by, my stomach was growling but the flight attendants carried out their orders to the letter.
“By the time we arrived in Frankfurt, the girls were famished but the boot camp was not over for us yet. The ‘nil by mouth’ instruction lasted another six hours on the bus to Vittel. We arrived fatigued, hungry and angry.”
Ford, now 61, is one of the biggest victims of the shameful East German doping regime, denied multiple swimming gold medals by young athletes juiced to the eyeballs on testosterone.
But that heartbreak is only part of Ford’s story, with the treatment at the hands of a misogynist regime especially brutal highlighted by camps with daily weigh ins and subsequently an abuse of laxatives to avoid punishment.
“We were back to daily weigh-ins for the women’s team, each morning the same routine: lined up, weighed and scrutinised,” she wrote of pre-Games camps.
“At least now the weigh-ins were at our motel away from the boys but an ounce gained was the subject of whispers around the pool deck.
“I watched as laxatives were taken in time for weigh-ins to make sure the dial was on the ounce. The anxiety and denigration wore heavily on all the girls. We heard no talk of any weigh-ins for the male swimmers.
“The exercise was neither meaningful nor based on sound scientific research and, sadly, the reaction of our coaches and managers overshadowed our good work in the pool.
“It felt like Montreal ’76 all over again for some of us: four years on, at 17, we were now among the oldest girls on the squad. No lessons had been learned.”
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Originally published as Denied meals, locked in rooms: Olympic champion Michelle Ford’s swimming hell
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