Humiliating weigh-ins, bulimia and other horrors. That’s what it was like for a former UK Junior Championships gold medalist with a promising career.
Phoebe Lenderyou says she suffered from the eating disorder for years as a result of extreme criticism and weight checks ordered by her swim coaches.
Furthermore, she added that she was just one of many swimmers who regularly they starved before they were weighed and that coaches often blamed poor pool performance on weight gain.
On one occasion, he said, a group of athletes were “put to the test” by the coaches.
They would have been offered chocolate cake and called “failures” when they ate it.
Lenderyou told that He left the sport with his “ruined sanity” and spent years trying to recover.
“When I told them [estas historias] to my friends and family and they couldn’t believe it. It is completely shameful that it happened,” he said.
The BBC has spoken to a number of swimmers, parents and coaches alleging ill-treatment at clubs across England.
The allegations, dating back more than a decade, include bullying, shaming, emotional abuse, allowing himself to trainathletes while injuredyesput downs, obsession with weight and fail to address eating disorders.
‘I won medals but I felt worthless’
Louise Graham, Regional Development Manager for Swim England North East, has investigated multiple examples of victim harassment and humiliation.
She thinks there was a “old-fashioned” view that athletes had to toughen up to succeed.
“People uncritically adopt the bad habits considering that ‘if it was fine 20 years ago, it’s fine now, this is what it takes to be an Olympic champion and that’s it,’” he said.
“But that view is very irresponsible and needs to be changed.”
In February 2022, the BBC revealed that Shropshire’s elite Ellesmere College Titans swimming club closed its doors after a year-long investigation into more than 70 complaints from swimmers that included bullying, shaming, emotional abuse, and self-harm.
Since then, the BBC has been inundated with reports of malpractice at all levels of the sport, although many victims are afraid to speak.
The accusations include:
- The swimmers lost so much weight that their periods stopped.
- A teenage girl was told to keep exercising with a broken rib so she could continue her ‘fat burning sessions’.
- A club forced athletes to train for hours without drinking water on weigh-in days so fluid retention doesn’t affect the scale.
- Shouting and insulting boys and girls for their poor performance, often related to exhaustion and lack of nutrition.
- The BBC also saw evidence of a machine used to track the weight of a 15-year-old swimmer who had been given a false birth date because it was intended for adults only.
Lenderyou said that on one occasion a trainer pointed to parts of his body and said that he had put on weight.
This former British swimmer has won national meets, competed in the European Juniors and earned the gold at the Commonwealth Youth Games in 2011, making her “the person to watch.”
But she went from being on international podiums to being reprimanded for her size.
The regular public weigh-ins and a restricted diet they became an obsession that he struggled to control.
loneliness and isolation
For five years he suffered from bulimia and binge eating disorders.
“Was so lonely and very, very sad. I couldn’t tell anyone what was going on and I felt completely useless,” she said.
“There was no way I could show any weakness, so I just hid it.”
Lenderyou fell in love with swimming while at the City of Newcastle Swimming Club, which is now disbanded.
When he was 16 he moved 400 miles from home to attend Plymouth College, which has a longstanding association with the Plymouth Leander Swimming Club and describes itself as a “world leading school in performance sports”.
The swimmer counts as in one session, she was pulled aside and a coach pointed to parts of her body and told her that she had gained weight “here, here and here”.
“I just thought, ‘well, I’m wrong now,’” said Lenderyou, who was at the time training tirelessly for world trials.
“I had bulimia all week and had no energy at all. The obsession with food really sucks you in.”
At the intensive training centers run by British Swimming, Lenderyou recalled that the young athletes were in the pool for four hours, walked for two and starved before weigh-in days.
He said that one night they put A chocolate cake on the table and the swimmers devoured it.
Then a trainer told them that they had put it there as a test, and they had failed.
“We just thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we are horrible people.’ You were consumed with guilt, you felt that if you ate a treat, it would prevent you from getting to where you wanted to be.
Changes pairto better
Lenderyou resigned in his second year at Plymouth, with “his mental health ruined because of the constant disappointment.”
She started swimming again when she moved to Canada and found a supportive coach.
Phoebe said her new coach was the “saving grace” and helped her have a healthy attitude towards food.
“It was amazing, he just wanted me to be happy”, said.
“The conversation about food was really positive, making sure that I was well fed and not tired.”
Plymouth College said that I had not received any complaints about training practices.
And he added that he took swimming “extremely seriously” and that he had full confidence in the training of Plymouth Leander.
Other swimmers told the BBC that the “obsession” of your trainers with calorie counting it had left them with an unhealthy relationship with food.
focus on weight
Zara, who does not want to be identified by her real name for fear of repercussions, competed at national level with a club from the north of England.
On a trip abroad, she lost almost a pound in three weeks because he was afraid to eat in front of his trainer.
“The focus was always on our weight,” he said.
“We didn’t have a nutritionist or anythingwe just counted calories the whole time.”
When she lost almost 3.5 kg after a flu, she was praised for the drastic weight loss.
“Many swimmers had anorexic and binge eating habits,” he said.
“Some had no periods for a year because they lost a lot of weight.
He claimed they were reprimanded for swimming poorly, which was often because they were exhausted from train 20 hours a week on a poor diet.
Zara was one step away from becoming one of the best British swimmers, but he left the sport due to the damage it caused him.
“I used to swim in tears,” she recounted.
“When you’re so young, you don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Then you start to have a voice at 17, 18, and you learn that these things are not okay.”
Another swimmer told the BBC she thought her dreams had come true when she joined a renowned swimming club, but she ended up terrified of eating the “wrong” thing and was afraid of her trainer.
Sophie, not her real name, was ordered to attend additional sessions to burn fat.
and regularly had panic attacks at the possibility of falling asleep when the alarm went off at 05:00.
training with injuries
When she broke her ribs in a fall, she trained in pain because she was too scared to tell her trainer.
And when she finally did, they sent her to exercise at an exercise bike to continue “burning fat”.
He said he had stayed feeding problems more than four years after giving up swimming.
“It broke my spirit, it broke my dreams. There is a part of me that is still angry,” she said.
“Even now, I try to put on a bathing suit and I can’t.”
A review is underway about how complaints at Swim England were handled in the wake of some high-profile investigations.
Following the Ellesmere Titans investigation, which found swimmers had suffered from eating disorders as a result of the club’s public weigh-in regime for boys aged 10 and under, the sport’s governing body Swim England has said that swimmers under the age of 18 should not weigh themselves unless they are going to appear at the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games.
Graham, who has investigated some of these allegations and led lectures on the subject at Staffordshire University, said it was vital that the sport review its methods to make sure it didn’t harm the swimmers.
“Elite athletes are told ‘if you miss a sessionyou’re a loseryou have to sacrifice everything to be successful,’” he said.
“But this is an endurance sport and…teenagers who swim more than 16 hours a week They are already making great sacrifices.”.
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