A few years after competing in synchronized swimming at the London Olympics in 2012, Hungary’s Szofi Kiss started working with a coach from Russia, whom she identified only by her first name as Natalia. The trainer, Kiss said, separated some members of his training group into what she called “Team Chubby”, sometimes denied their dinner and said, “You guys make me sick” and “I’m sick of looking at you” when swimmers left the pool after training.
Kiss, now 26, described the coach’s tactics as “terrifying emotional”.
Natalia Tarasova, the coach of the national team at that time and the only coach named Natalia listed in the minutes of the Hungarian artistic federation’s meetings in those years, did not respond to requests for comment. But synchronized elite swimmers – who are mostly women, with few men at the elite level – routinely experience bullying, harassment and psychological abuse from male and female coaches, they said in recent interviews with The New York Times and other news organizations and in social media posts and blogs.
With the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics approaching in July, artistic swimming, as the sport is now known, is inundated by a scandal that has recently surfaced in Canada and in a handful of other countries.
Interviewed swimmers described an unhealthy culture of thinness and disordered eating at an event that inevitably fosters tension between art and sport. Artistic impression, appearance and body contour in the judges’ score.
“If you are not tall and super skinny – basically if you don’t look like a model – with fair skin, you have no chance of reaching the top level,” said Myriam Glez, 40, former US executive president Artistic swimming and two Olympic times.
Katie Spada, 28, from the United States said she was sometimes called a “dying whale” by a former trainer and, at 13, she was told “I had breasts like Marilyn Monroe and they were getting in the way”.
These observations “seemed very inadequate, but were only normalized in practice,” said Spada.
Research published as an undergraduate thesis at UCLA by Alison Williams, 31, a former elite artistic swimmer, indicated that almost two-thirds of the members of the American national team between the 1990s and 2019 who responded to their research were either professionally diagnosed or self-diagnosed with depression.
“All athletes experienced some level of emotional abuse,” wrote Williams.
Kiss coach at the 2012 Olympics, a Hungarian compatriot named Gábor Szauder, one of the few male coaches at the elite level, is now under intense scrutiny as Canada’s National Artistic Swimming coach. Last fall, he was accused by five swimmers of making sexist comments, athletes who embarrass their weight and commit other disturbing behaviors. Since then, he has faced similar criticism from swimmers and leaders in Slovakia, where he trained from 2013 to 2018, before leaving for Canada.
On Tuesday, a lawsuit was filed in Montreal by five former elite swimmers, accusing Canada Artistic Swimming, the national governing body, of failing to provide a safe environment and neglecting the abusive behavior of Szauder and previous coaches.
Canada Artistic Swimming and Szauder denied any wrongdoing. They did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the process. Szauder also did not respond to previous attempts to contact him. The governing body of the swimming world, known as FINA, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the process or to several requests for comment on the troubled state of artistic swimming.
The lawsuit – which seeks collective action and financial compensation for “moral damage” – reflects an attempt to clean up a sport that sought to change its image after coaches were accused of mistreating athletes in Spain, Mexico, the United States and other countries. Swimmers seem less and less willing to undergo degrading treatments by coaches, whose behavior is often described, in part, as a remnant of tactics used in the ancient Eastern bloc and in China, another artistic power of swimming.
Artistic swimming was introduced at the Olympics in 1984, and the Russians have dominated, winning all team and duet competitions since 2000. Many top coaches are from countries that have been in the Soviet sphere of influence. Background checks are not uniform across countries, officials say. The accused coaches usually move from one country to another with little or no consequence.
Adam Andrasko, the current chief executive of USA Artistic Swimming, said he accepted the position in 2018 knowing that the sport as a whole “needed to have a different cultural outlook”. Efforts in the United States and elsewhere have included diversity campaigns, nutrition seminars and the development of an athlete’s rights statement.
Until recently, artistic swimmers – superb athletes who were able to hold their breath for more than a minute while performing routines – tended not to talk about the coaches’ abusive treatment. They rise to the elite level as teenagers and say that they often feel powerless when approaching managers, who may seem more concerned with results than with protecting athletes. To complain is to risk losing funding and a place on the team. But this reluctance to speak began to turn into a bold awakening.
Last September, Canada temporarily closed its national center for artistic swimming training in Montreal after athletes and some club coaches complained about a toxic practice environment there. Five swimmers introduced themselves to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and accused Szauder of making inappropriate sexual comments and embarrassing athletes about their weight to the point that they had panic attacks. He was also accused of making Islamophobic comments, such as saying that all Muslims are extremists and telling swimmers that they should learn to cook and clean for their men or they would not be wanted.
A swimmer who spoke to the CBC, Sion Ormond, 21, is the plaintiff in the lawsuit against Canada Artistic Swimming. Ormond said in an interview with The Times that Szauder, dissatisfied with the warm-up in a 2019 competition in China, told swimmers “if we kept swimming like this, he would hit us so hard that we wouldn’t know what happened. ”Later, it was suggested that Szauder meant that he would hit swimmers with difficult practices, but Ormond said that she felt physically threatened.
In another incident, Ormond said that Szauder told her, “Sion, zip up your sweatshirt before I get too excited.” Such behavior by Szauder was condoned by Canadian authorities, Ormond said, as a cultural difference because he was European. She retired last summer because she found the training environment unbearable.
Last October, an independent organization dedicated to safe sport, called ITP Sport, reviewed the allegations made by Canadian swimmers. His report found “experiences of psychological abuse, bullying, neglect, sexual harassment, discrimination and a general culture of fear”.
Before being hired to coach the Canadian national team in November 2018, Szauder coached Slovakia’s national art swimming team for five years. After the Canadian scandal broke out last fall, media reports surfaced in Slovakia describing similar complaints there – often ignored by swimming officials – about Szauder’s training methods.
Viktoria Reichova, 23, a swimmer who went into public confrontation with Szauder after being suspended, told a newspaper that she sometimes referred to Slovak athletes as “little pigs”. Another swimmer’s father said that some athletes basically ate nothing but nuts for several days, fearing they would be called fat during weigh-in.
Anton Siekel, chairman of the Slovak Olympic Committee, said in an email to The Times that complaints about Szauder’s “strange behavior and attitude” towards training have been lodged by several parents and swimmers there, helping to spur an initiative to provide a safe sport. “I am glad that we are no longer afraid to talk about problems like this in sports,” wrote Siekel. “Harassment, intolerance and violence have no place in sport.”
Some current and former swimmers continue to support Szauder. Kiss, the Hungarian swimmer who was trained by Szauder during her teens, said she did not experience any of the behaviors alleged by Canadian swimmers. She said Szauder was a father figure who elevated her career to Olympic status and described her coaching style as “completely normal”.
Canadian artistic swimmers made it clear that the abusive behavior on the part of the coaches and the shame of the body started before Szauder became the coach of the national team. An Instagram account, @mental_abuse_nac, was recently created for athletes to voice their concerns. More than 50 responded anonymously.
Gabriella Brisson, 27, one of the plaintiffs in the current lawsuit, said in an interview that a former Canadian team coach once suggested that she move to Africa to lose weight.
Geneviève Peel, 26, a medical student and former elite Canadian swimmer, wrote a series of blog posts in October, describing the desperation that left her sitting on the edge of chairs to make her thighs look thinner, counting the number exact amount of almonds she had for a snack and developed an “overwhelming” fear of gaining a single pound.
Eventually, Peel wrote, she developed an acute generalized anxiety disorder that required three visits to the emergency room in an ambulance, psychotherapy and medications she still takes. “Synchro taught me that I could never be enough”, “to hate my body” and that “my sanity was less important than my performance,” she wrote.
More than 50 artistic swimmers from 16 countries were interviewed by The Times. Some said they were pushed into uncomfortable stretching positions, such as divisions, until they cried. Spada, from the United States, said that at age 13, she was once pushed so hard by a technician that she needed hip surgery.
Spoons, scissors and other metal objects used as touch devices for swimmers to hear underwater are sometimes thrown at athletes by upset coaches. And swimmers sometimes have skewers for roasting marshmallows glued to the back of their legs during training. Skewers can stab if their legs are not kept straight during routine testing.
Olivia Zhang, 30, who once competed for the Chinese national team, said her coach used a metal rod to hit her knee when her leg was not fully extended out of the water during training, leaving a scar. “Every time I look at him, it just brings up unpleasant memories,” said Zhang.
Teresa Ixchel Alonso Garcia, 24, who competed for the Mexican national team for 12 years, said that in 2019 she was hospitalized for internal bleeding related to the stress of swimming, but was pressured by her coach to compete.
“Many times I could have passed out, but from the expression on her face I realized that it didn’t matter to her,” said Alonso Garcia of his coach.
Anastasia Gloushkov Leventhal, 35, competed in four Israeli Olympics. Her mother, who is from Moscow, trained her and their relationship remained strong. But Gloushkov Leventhal said he realized that athletes from other countries often do not have the same satisfying experience.
“You don’t want to give up on that golden dream,” said Gloushkov Leventhal, “but at what cost?”
Miroslava Germanová contributed reporting from Bratislava, Slovakia. Susan Beachy contributed to the research.