MILAN – “They made us fast to maintain weight by forcing us to eat toothpaste and food found in the garbage. We were forced to train in an outdoor competition suit with the thermometer below zero, they slapped us, kicked us, took off the mattresses under the tools as punishment and injured us, dragged the girls by the hair and threw objects at us. “. The harsh accusations of about twenty athletes of the Greek Olympic gymnastics team against their coaches – put in black and white in a letter sent to the President of the Republic Katerina Sakellaropoulou and to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis – open the second scandal in a few months at the top of the sport of the country that invented the Olympics.
Greece, controversy over lockdowns and police violence, clashes in Athens, an injured officer
by Ettore Livini
The first very hard blow to the federal top came last December when the sailing champion Sofia Bekatourou (gold at the Athens Games in 2004 and bronze in Beijing four years later) denounced that she had been the victim of “harassment and sexual violence” by of a member of the federation on the eve of the 2000 Olympic trials. The person responsible – who denied the accusations – was removed and the words of the sailor, who in Greece is a sort of sporting monument, convinced many other women in other worlds, especially in the artistic one, to take courage and report similar episodes. Forcing the premier to announce new rules that make these crimes more easily punishable.
The letter from the gymnasts, published by the Efsy newspaper, recounts episodes dating back to 1985 and the names of the athletes who signed it were not revealed. Thanassis Stathopoulos, the new number one of the federation just elected, announced an immediate investigation: “We are with the athletes and we will clarify,” he said. His predecessor Thanassis Vassiliadis asked “that the names of the guilty be mentioned so that they can be fired immediately”. The Greek champions of this discipline had already denounced in recent months the leaders of the sport for the disastrous state of maintenance of the facilities in which they are forced to train. In particular, the federal center of Agios Kosmas, which was flooded last June, is targeted. “Whenever it rains we have to stop training because the water enters the facility,” said Lefteris Petrounias, Olympic gold medalist in the rings in Rio. A few days ago one of the asymmetrical parallels broke during a training session and the technicians accused the federation of a “medieval” management for the lack of inspections (“for years”) of the structures.
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