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Friday 27 November 2020
Pauline Schäfer is world gymnastics champion and, apparently, a victim of her national coach’s more than questionable methods. Harmful comments about weight were on the agenda, he says. Furthermore, the drugs are said to have been administered without a doctor’s order.
Gymnastics star Pauline Schäfer had been harassed by her coach for years, but when she decided she was “not just the little gym robot” anymore, he became “especially bad”. At least that’s what the former world champion of the barbell says in “Spiegel”. The 23-year-old says she’s tired of keeping quiet. Along with five other gymnasts, Schäfer is making serious allegations against a trainer at the Chemnitz federal base.
It concerns training beyond the pain threshold, mental humiliation, food compulsion: according to this, shepherds and companions – even as minors – were exposed to psychological violence during training, inappropriate methods were used and drugs were administered without a prescription. As a gymnast, you can endure a lot, Schäfer told Spiegel: “But being humiliated every day – that leaves its mark at some point.”
The German Gymnastics Federation (DTB) “condemns all forms of violence and distances itself from any training methods described in today’s issue of ‘Spiegel’,” he said in a statement. If the allegations were to be confirmed, “this would in no way correspond to the values of the DTB and the framework conditions for responsible training”. The “allegations raised are taken with extreme seriousness and the facts in question will be immediately clarified independently in order to then be able to decide on the possible consequences”.
The list of scandals in gymnastics
The trainer’s attorney spoke to Spiegel about “a multitude of untruths and unfounded accusations”. Schäfer reported being tortured for years. The training has exceeded the limits of his physical and mental resilience. “Most of the time we didn’t have the courage to say if something was hurting us, because then we said: get back on your feet, others can resist too,” said Schäfer, who trained for Germany at the Olympic Games Rio 2016.
Over and over again he had to hear painful sayings because of his figure, his weight. “Those remarks did not escape her, so she deliberately wanted to hold me back,” said Schäfer, speaking of “psychological terror”. The pressure was so great that three other girls from the boarding school “even” scratched themselves for a while, “Schäfer said, injuring themselves, perhaps to relieve stress.
Schäfer is not just a gym enthusiast. He won seven German championship titles, bronze on the balance beam at the 2015 World Cup and gold two years later. Scandals in gymnastics had accumulated recently, in the United States, England and Switzerland athletes have reported abuse. This also gives Schäfer and his colleagues the courage to go public and report on how they allegedly have been treated or led to eating disorders. “Many injuries have not healed yet,” said Schäfer, but his former coach “couldn’t break me.”
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