‘I thought I could stop him’: Taryn Neville, former Alex Parnov assistant coach, reveals she tried to protect Nina Kennedy
Taryn Neville says she was groomed by coach Alex Parnov as a teen. When she became his assistant coach, she hoped she could protect other young stars from harm, including a talented Nina Kennedy.
It was a searing 39C Perth day when talent scout Taryn Neville took her place in the Perry Lakes stadium stands to watch the state’s best young athletes sprint and race in the state relay championships.
A 12-year-old Nina Kennedy caught her eye quickly. Kennedy was fast and nimble. Neville could see she was talented and could become an Olympic pole vaulter.
“Very quickly I knew Nina to be someone that would go all the way,” Neville said. “Even at 12 you could just tell. She was perfectly built for the sport, having a gymnastic background and a beautiful running style … she was a great kid.”
Neville, once a pole vaulter herself with big Olympic dreams, was now assistant to the man then regarded as the world’s best coach. Alex Parnov was a mastermind when it came to the discipline and regarded as the best technical coach globally.
On that day in December 2008, Neville recruited Kennedy, and another young girl named Emma Phillipe, into Parnov’s coveted squad at the Western Australian Institute of Sport. Neville had great hopes for them both, but privately she also thought, because she was now an assistant coach, she could protect them from harm. “I feel so guilty,” she said this week. “I thought if I was there, coaching, keeping an eye on him, I would know if he tried anything on someone else, but I now know I didn’t … it breaks my heart.”
Neville understood how harmful the Russian-born coach could be, because she too was a victim of Parnov for nearly a decade. “He groomed me, he groomed many of us,” Neville said. “And he did a great job of it, because none of us barely said anything, until now …”
Neville said it was only now she could speak about what happened to her because it was just this week she realised the gravity of what happened to her as a teenager and then a young adult.
And just like former pole vaulter Amanda Bisk, a friend of Neville who revealed this week that she had been allegedly assaulted by Parnov in a hotel room, she had buried this pain deep inside.
It was only when she picked up The Weekend Australian last Saturday, where she read the accounts of seven women, including Olympic champion Kennedy, that she started to reconcile with what had happened to her.
She only just told her family this week, after reading The Australian’s investigation into Parnov and the accounts of Olympians Kym Howe and Alana Quade as well as a stunning statement from Kennedy. The nine women who have come forward to the investigation all have strikingly similar stories to tell about Parnov’s alleged behaviour and repeated sexual touching.
Neville began in Parnov’s squad at age 19. “I was training in his junior squad and was progressing quickly,” she said.
She had hopes of representing Australia and, once she was in the Parnov fold, she knew she was a chance. But before every training session something “strange” would happen, that she would just get “used to” in a way: that is, Parnov would bring the female athletes in for a tight hug and a kiss – on the lips. It was only one day, when another senior female vaulter pulled her aside and firmly said “don’t you ever let him touch you like that again”, that she started to realise Parnov’s behaviour was “not quite right”.
But Neville still wanted to represent her country and Parnov had her hopes in his hands.
As time wore on, she endured Parnov stroking her hair, telling her how he liked her to “wear” her hair, inappropriately touching her, telling her to wear certain bathers for their beach recovery sessions. “He liked me in a white pair of bathers,” she said. “He said; ‘they looked good on me and I should wear them’”.
Like many of the Parnov victims she was made to feel part of his family. He invited her into his family home, she spent hours at his house over the years, she babysat his daughters. Then one night, in 2001, she fielded a phone call from him before midnight.
“I was 19 when he first rang me; it was 11.14pm … which was really odd,” she said. “The phone was next to my bed. And I just thought: ‘What the hell? Why is Alex calling me?’ And I don’t know why, but I answered it. He was breathing, really heavy on the phone.
“It was really creepy. And then he said, I just need to tell you that: ‘I love you. I love to hold you. I love touching you.’ He made comments, such as ‘I want to have you in my arms’. And I was just frozen, I didn’t speak, I don’t even remember how the conversation ended, but I just said, I have to go … And I hung up on him, and then I literally didn’t eat for two days after that. I was just a mess. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t think I could go back to training, but I thought: ‘Oh my God. I really want this. What am I going to do?’”
At the next training Parnov “intimidated” Neville as she trained doing sprints. “He kept testing me with odd requests and comments,” she said.
“I was doing a sprint and I was not surprisingly very tense and his wife Nadia called out to me to ‘just relax, Taryn’ and he then yelled out to me: ‘Relax, Taryn, why you so tense? What’s wrong with you?’”
On another occasion Parnov tried to kiss her in the “pole shed” – a small room where the poles were kept – he drew her into him and attempted to kiss her on the lips. She declined and made her escape. When his advances were turned down, he would always “intimidate” her.
“I always felt incredibly nervous and uncomfortable, I never knew what he was going to say or do, I was on edge,” Neville said.
He also, like so many other women have told The Australian, berated her and her body.
“I was only 58 kilos but I remember him grabbing me on the stomach and saying: ‘You’re fat, I’m not going to coach you until you sort it out,’” she said. “And he would literally ignore me, I didn’t exist, it was hard to endure, it was unbearable at times.
“So these things all happened when I was really young, about 19 until 23,” she said. “And apart from one person I trained with, I never really told anybody …”
But years on, in 2008, she found herself back in Parnov’s web, when he invited her to be a pole vault coach at the WA Institute of Sport. “He contacted me to come and work with him and I just felt if I was there, he wouldn’t do it to anybody else, and I could keep an eye on him … that was my way of dealing with what had happened to me,” Neville said.
“I was his assistant coach at WAIS from 2008 to 2013, I scouted Emma and Nina, and I coached those girls and a big group of young kids in that time and to the point where when I stopped coaching, I don’t believe he touched those girls and I never thought he would …”
Neville says it pained her to read this week that Kennedy became a target of Parnov. Kennedy, who despite fighting a “battle” to have Parnov held to account behind closed doors for many years, steeled herself to win both World Championship and Olympic gold. Phillipe, now an 800m runner, told The Weekend Australian he “wrecked” her career and she had endured an eating disorder because of him.
While Neville was trying to protect those around her, Parnov was also harassing the now coach at WAIS. She was subjected to inappropriate behaviour as she coached. On interstate trips, Neville also found herself invited into his room to do some “work”.
“On two occasions when I was travelling with him, as a young coach, he got me to sit on the bed with him, on both occasions I sat next to him and he began stroking my hair and started to say inappropriate things,” she said. “I was frozen, it felt like forever but was probably only seconds before I asked him to stop, stood up and I left.”
One of the most extraordinary interactions with Parnov happened when she had her newborn in her arms. Even in that moment he did not stop pursuing her. “I had a four-week baby when he showed up at my house,” she said. “He just got back from Europe. It was September 2009, he came and visited me and brought some presents for the baby. ‘I will never ask you this again, this is the last time I’m going to ask you this’ he said. ‘Let’s run away together, I will take care of you and the baby and we can be together’. I was shocked. He was literally sitting across my kitchen bench and my husband was upstairs. I laughed at him, I was stronger now and he didn’t intimidate me any more. I said: ‘Alex you’re being ridiculous. I have a brand new baby with somebody else and you have a wife and daughters’.”
Last weekend Kennedy told how WAIS had exposed her to “harmful conduct” for over a decade. “It was only once my coach resigned that I felt I could fulfil my potential … all the other individuals didn’t get that chance, which is heartbreaking.”
The pain is still real for many women. Neville watched on at WAIS as those who ran the institute gave him whatever “he wanted”. “He had such a bizarre control over you, you felt powerless,” Neville said. “He always made you feel like what was happening was acceptable, he knew exactly what he was doing and how to do so, so you never felt like you could do anything about it”.