Citation

Mountjoy M. Br. J. Sports Med. 2020; 54(7): 367-368.

Affiliation

International Olympic Committee Working Group on the Prevention of Harassment and Abuse in Sport, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, BMJ Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1136/bjsports-2020-101975

PMID

32188629

Abstract

At the age of 17, Mary Cain was a running phenomenon in the USA when she joined Nike’s Oregon Project. In November 2019 Mary Cain went public in the New York Times with allegations of psychological and physical abuse by her coach, Alberto Salazar,1 who has subsequently apologized.2 As a result of the public weighing practices, being told she needed to become “thinner, thinner and thinner” to improve her performance and public body shaming, Cain developed the syndrome of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S). Cain’s disturbing disclosure caused a flurry of media attention exposing the dark underbelly of elite youth sport culture.

Mary Cain’s story is a ‘call to action’ for sport. Do youth sport programmes meet the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s standards of a ‘safe sport’ culture?3 In the recent publication on Safeguarding at the Youth Olympic Games (YOG2018), 1254 athletes were asked to define their understanding of the term ‘safe sport’. The results were sobering. …

Language: en

Keywords

psychology; sexual harassment; women in sport; young