Something Safe Sport doesn't talk about...

I was laying in bed after training tonight (good training, by the way - getting into a bit of a rhythm) and I saw a link for an album to an old competition. It was from 2022 in Canada (our provincials) and I couldn’t remember if I did that meet or not, I went to check. It’s so fun to see everyone when they were so young.

There were four pages of photos and I wasn’t even three quarters of the way down the first page when I realized that three people who are prominently featured in these photos have been banned from the sport. Wild. Three people who have played a big enough role in Trampoline in Alberta to be in many, many photos.

My first reaction was relief - for a couple of them, it was decades of knowing their behaviour without any action.

My second reaction was sitting with this weird, cultural move that they have been erased from the day to day currently, but live on in this yester-world. I made a video on a similar topic a while back, but it’s this weird piece of sport culture that something huge or catastrophic happens and the expectation is that everyone is to move on immediately. There are no conversations about these people - one day they were a huge part of the culture in province, and one day they are never to be spoken of or acknowledged again.

The more I go to therapy, the more I can see unhealthy patterns in sport. When something major happens, like coaches and athletes being forever banned from a sport that they dedicated their lives to, it’s weird that one day they are no longer there even if it was the right and safe thing to do. When I tell stories of my experiences with these people, it feels like I’m sitting around a campfire with a flashlight under my chin telling folktales and ghost stories.

I decided a trip down memory lane in this capacity wasn’t the move for 11pm on a school night (work night!), so I left the album for another nostalgic day.

I’ve spoken about this with friends, but the part that really hit home from those photos is that the abusive generation in sport is no longer the generation above me, it’s my generation now. It’s weird to look through those photos and remember living those moments, but now I can see the full picture - a culture that embraced these people and their bad behaviours until the system couldn’t turn a blind eye anymore. And two out of the three people in that are no longer involved are my age.

My naiveté was that our generation would be the one to fix sport. We grew up with a different generation of parents, coaches, experiences, therapy - and we would be the ones to stop the cycle. It’s wild to be that the same problems and norms that people are going down for from the ‘70’s are what people my age are going down for too.

I am tremendously hopeful of the next generation - I see them having much more open and honest conversations that never felt safe for my generation. I see the next generation not standing for things that were just accepted when I was growing up. It’s weird to lose faith in my own generation though, knowing the things we saw and experienced, and that people are perpetuating that cycle. It hits different when those people aren’t “others”, they were one of us.

TTYS,

RS

This is an excerpt from my Weekly RyView, check it out here:

Weekly RyView 002