Federal government freezes Gymnastics Canada funding after surge of abuse cases

The federal government has officially suspended all funding towards Gymnastics Canada due to allegations of abuse.

Amelia Cline is with Gymnasts 4 Change Canada. Her organization wants to bring more attention to everything wrong with the current state of the sport and to see Gymnastics Canada go through a third-party investigation regarding abuse.

“I think it’s a positive first step that the government has taken,” Cline said.

Cline believes that Gym Can’s funding won’t be accessible until it joins an official third-party program such as the Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner (OSIC).

Seeing forms of abuse from her past gymnastics days, Cline wants to be a part of changing the culture that’s still nowhere near perfect in 2022.

“I was a gymnast for about 12 years. For the last three years, I had coaches who were very verbally, psychologically and physically abusive so I experienced that kind of treatment every day for three years,” Cline said.

Cline started her gymnastics career when she was two years old and continued until she was 14. At the end of her career in 2003, Cline wrote a report to Gymnastics B.C. but says she never saw any real discipline handed out to her former coaches.

As the years went on, the former gymnast chose to write a blog describing her experience dealing with abuse in the sport. That triggered hundreds of responses from other gymnasts with similar stories.

“Other current and former gymnasts across the country (said) ‘This happened to me too. I’m so glad you’re speaking out about it, and what can we do to change things?’ ” Cline said.

The biggest alarm to Cline is that since she stopped training in 2003, there hasn’t been any change in the sport to this day.

“We’re hoping to understand where and how this culture is broken that’s allowing this kind of abuse to prevail,” Cline said.

“We’re really wanting to see meaningful consequences for people who are perpetrating those abuses and who are enabling them.”

Cline says that isn’t just happening in her hometown of Langley, B.C., or where she trained in Coquitlam. She says it’s happening everywhere from small towns to large cities across the country.

She says one of the big reasons cases can get swept under the rug comes from the lack of education from the parents’ side.

“It’s hard because the culture very early on is that the coach is the authority and they should always be the person in charge, that the coach knows what they’re doing,” Cline said.

“There’s this natural removal of the parents from these environments and that really often prevents parents from picking up on some of these red flags that are happening early on in a child’s career.”

Cline says as this continues, parents become more immune to the abuse and believe everything is done as a coaching technique to get their son or daughter to the college or Olympic level.

“I think parents need so much more education on what to be looking for and to be present when these kids are in the gym,” she said.

Editor’s note: A picture attached to an earlier version of this article showed the inside of a local gymnastics facility. It left the reader with the impression that somehow it was connected to the allegations of abuse against Gymnastics Canada. It is not. We regret the error.