ROME — The head of
Italy’s Olympic committee
has apologized to a group of former gymnasts who alleged they were bullied
about their weight and diets by national team coaches.
اضافة اعلان
Three former rhythmic gymnastics, including two
double world champions made claims of abuse which nearly drove one of them to
suicide in a series of interviews with daily
La Repubblica last week.
“As president of the Olympic Committee ... I feel
the duty to apologies to any current or former athletes who may have suffered
due to inappropriate behavior,” CONI chief Giovanni Malago said in an interview
with La Repubblica published on Monday.
Nina Corradini, Anna Basta, and Giulia Galtarossa
described how they had been castigated by coaches about their weight and diets.
Basta said she had twice thought about killing
herself while 19-year-old Corradini quit the national set-up last year after
spending “every minute of the previous few months wishing I could escape”.
World champion in 2009 and 2010 and now 31,
Galtarossa detailed one degrading episode in which she was blasted by a
coaching assistant for eating a pear while in a restaurant affiliated with the
Italian gymnastics federation, and being handed her diet sheet with the message
“we have a little piggy in the squad”.
Malago told La Repubblica that “anyone who has made
mistakes will pay for them, if they have been made”.
“We need to work out if these were talking about
individual errors or if there was a system that pushed people to make those
errors,” added Malago.
The 63-year-old admitted that weight was “a crucial
aspect of gymnastics, more so than in other sports”.
“A certain degree of rigor and harshness is
inevitable, but it’s something else when you cross the line into violence and
humiliation,” he said.
The revelations led to a meeting on Wednesday
between Italy’s new sport minister Andrea Abodi, Malago and the president of
the gymnastics federation Gherardo Tecchi, while representatives of the
athletes demanded “a cultural revolution” in the sport.
Tecchi said that an investigation into the claims
would be carried out, asking coaches and athletes to step forward and testify.
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