Αθλητισμός και κακοποιητικές συμπεριφορές: Η περίπτωση ανήλικων αθλητών και αθλητριών της ενόργανης γυμναστικής στην Ελλάδα

Abstract

In April 2021, former gymnasts, members of the Greek national artistic gymnastics team accused their coaches of physical and verbal violence, threats, punishments and sexual harassment. In January 2022, an accusation of sexual abuse of a former female athlete by her coach was added to the above. In the effort to decode the phenomenon of abuse of athletes in gymnastics, particularly in Greece, qualitative research was carried out. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted, of eight former gymnasts, seven women and a man, who had been members of the Greek national gymnastics team and discussed their lives and experiences as elite athletes. Τhe answers of the athletes were thoroughly studied in order to understand the way in which the athletes experience and interpret the violence of the coach and how they deal with it, as well as the way in which they perceive the hierarchical relationships with the coaches and their position in the field of artistic gymnastics. The method of thematic analysis was used to provide answers to the research questions that were posed. The research focuses on violence of the coach as “symbolic violence”, a violence that is “misrecognized” as such by the athletes. The authority of the coach emerges as one of the key factors that turns young athletes into “docile bodies”, productive and beneficial in terms of sport, with the use of panoptic and discipline mechanisms, under a strong dispositif that develops within the field of artistic gymnastics. In this article it is argued that in the cases studied, the career of elite gymnasts included the establishment of a cognitive order that concealed the violence of the power relations that developed at the time in the field of gymnastics.