Dirty pool: Australian swimming’s ‘disgusting open secret’
Olympian Maddie Groves’s social media posts have set off a discussion around Australian swimming’s culture.
It is claimed body shaming and perving is a “disgusting open secret” in swimming.
Olympic medallist Maddie Groves wrote as much in a tweet last November and this week in a series of posts she alleged Australian swimming was rife with sexism and misogyny.
The posts came soon after she announced her withdrawal from the Australian swim team trials in Adelaide. The rumour mill went off, saying Groves was just attention-seeking because she wasn’t going to make Tokyo Olympics.
The fact is Australian swimming has long had a problem with women and girls. It is a sport that has managed only to have two female Olympic swim coaches in its history. Just two – Ursula Carlile and Tracey Menzies – in the Olympics’ 125-year history. It is a sport that has left young girls starving, humiliated, wrestling with body issues from “fat shaming” and in turn left with severe mental health issues. Some have been suicidal.
And it’s hard to ignore historic sexual assault allegations against former Australian Olympic swim team coaches. Or that the annual Australian swimming coaches conference used to see strippers “raffled off” – the “sex parties” apparently stopped in 2009.
It certainly is an “open secret” that “fat shaming” on the pool deck is common, a practice that some of our best ever Olympians, in gold medallists Libby Trickett and Leisel Jones, have called out.
The sport is begging for a wholly independent review of its senior male coaches’ attitudes towards women and girls. Groves’s social media posts should be a catalyst for change.
It was this week Groves claimed there was a “pervy”, “misogynistic” culture in the sport.
She said she had been “body shamed” and suffered “medical gaslighting”. Groves, who suffers from endometriosis and adenomyosis, felt senior Australian swimming figures didn’t take her women’s health issues seriously.
Last year Groves also wrote that no one took her original complaint seriously after she suffered through a senior male coach leering at her “tits”.
Swimming Australia has said it doesn’t have a complaint on record and it is understood it has repeatedly tried to reach out to Groves to investigate her social media allegations further.
As one swimmer told The Weekend Australian, if Groves had a complaint on file it “would imply women actually trust Swimming Australia”. Some say Swimming Australia has “made a mistake” if it thinks “this situation” is just about Groves.
There is a suggestion there needs to be an independent avenue for athletes to complain about swimming officials anonymously and without fear.
The support for Groves privately has been strong. Her Rio Olympics teammate Taylor McKeown, who is competing this week in Adelaide, acknowledged her experience.
“You’ve put up with so much shit mads, and been on your own for it. You’re a strong woman,” McKeown wrote on Groves’s Instagram page with a fist pump emoji in support of her stance.
Triple Olympic champion Libby Trickett supported Groves’s stance on calling out body shaming in the sport. Trickett, a seven-time Olympic medallist, opened up to The Weekend Australian about being body-shamed by senior male coaches. She recalled being bluntly told to lose weight during her decorated career. She said the coaches’ delivery crippled her self-esteem and made her feel like a “shit” person.
An elite coach who called The Weekend Australian backed Groves and Trickett by saying he too had repeatedly heard “fat shaming” at Swimming Australia’s high-performance centres. He said coaches, rather than blame their own coaching methods if the “kid” was underperforming, would just dub the girl “fat”.
“The fat-shaming is worse with elite coaches, these guys’ identities are caught up in results, if any of the kids don’t perform then they simply say, ‘she is too fat’ or ‘he is a pussy’,” he said. “It happens at every high-performance hub in the country.
“Any time there is a female athlete that is underperforming, it always comes back to weight, despite what we know now about so many different things that contribute to their performance, they see it as their right to fat shame. They think ‘I am a high-performance coach. I can say what I want’. They think they are in sheds of an NRL team, thinking the girl or woman might be able to handle it.”
In her 2015 autobiography Body Lengths, Olympic champion Leisel Jones described swimming coaches using secret code words to describe some girls as fat without them knowing. The phrase was 6:1:20 — the sixth, first and 20th letters of the alphabet: f-a-t.
Jones wrote the girls soon worked it out and later they would cry in the showers. Distance swimmer Grace Hull told the ABC last year how as a 15-year-old she was selected for an Australian junior team and endured daily public weigh-ins with the results passed around for everyone to see. She was left with mental health issues.
“I think every girl goes through a stage in their athletic career where they start to plateau through puberty,” the swimmer said.
“A lot of my plateau was blamed on my weight gain and how my body was changing shape. And it was heavily criticised by coaches and support staff.”
Swimming undoubtedly has disturbing practices and a very dark history.
There have been sexual assault allegations against Olympic coaches including Scott Volkers (coach of Susie O’Neill). Although he was charged, Volkers was never convicted of abusing three female swimmers. In March last year charges against him were permanently stayed and won’t proceed after a court found it would be “unfairly and unjustifiably oppressive” to allow him to be prosecuted.
Former swimmer Julie Gilbert, who was one of Volkers’s accusers, said more needed to be done at swimming’s highest level to clean up the sport’s patchy history with regards to some coaches who abuse the trust of their athletes.
“There are still a lot of questions that need to be asked of Swimming Australia in terms of: ‘What are you doing to fix this?’” Gilbert told The Sunday Telegraph. “You have children being left alone for long periods of time with their adult coaches with no other adult supervision.”
The coaching culture has long been questionable. A 2014 report revealed top Australian swimming coaches took part in parties involving strippers, porn movies and binge-drinking at their annual conference on the Gold Coast. Strippers were “raffled off” to give coaches and officials special shows during conferences from the 1990s through to 2009.
Some of those who attended those “private strip shows” at the annual coaches conference remain senior figures on the Australian swim team today.
As one Australian swim coach remarked: “If the swimming women came together, in a #metoo movement, there would be 20 guys out of the job.”
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