Part 3 GLOBAL ISSUES: HARASSMENT AND ABUSE RESEARCH

3.10 What price gold medals? An investigation into the negative emotional
responses of child athletes to their coaches in the UK
Misia Gervis
Background
In the pursuit of excellence, sport is demanding more and more from its
young elite performers. Young athletes are training longer and harder, and are
spending significantly more time with their coaches. Sport completely dominates
their lives and the relationships that they have with their coaches can become
more important to them than those with their parents. The prevailing culture in
elite sport is one where child athletes are expected to be compliant with the
demands of the coach if they are to be successful. The emotional and
psychological response of such child athletes to these conditions and the
potential for mental injury of these child athletes in these circumstances has
largely been ignored. The outside world does not perceive the children to be ‘at
risk’; indeed, in general the perception is the opposite. Performance
achievements mask the process through which they are realised, and there is an
acceptance that the ends justify the means.
Until now the development of the understanding of emotional abuse of
children has come from outside of sport and has essentially focused on childparent
relationships. This research has examined the pairing of parental
behaviour with the child’s emotional well-being. This dual focus on parental fault
and state of the child is evident in the literature with questions being raised about
establishing a causal relationship between parental behaviour and
psychopathology in the child. 1
It has been recently acknowledged that all forms of child maltreatment
have an emotional or psychological consequence for the child but, because it is
often internalised and so ‘invisible’, emotional abuse has received less attention
from clinicians and researchers than other forms of child maltreatment. It may,
however, have consequences that greatly outweigh and outlast the physical
injuries, or the physical results of neglect or the sexual abuse (see Fig. 3.2).
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