Cline, at two years old, stated that her parents were able to see her interest in the way she was pulling “little baby-chin-ups” at her kitchen counter.
She was soon a serious athlete. Cline was nine years old or ten when she began to outgrow her local coaches. She was now able to travel an hour from home in order to train at an elite club.
Cline loved the sport for a time, but things changed when Vladimir Lashin (and his wife Svetlana) joined her as the new coach team. Cline claims that the mood at the gym quickly changed.
“It was verbally abusive right away,” she said. “If you made any errors, they would shout and humiliate. You would be yelled at over and over, “This is rubbish, this is rubbish,” she said.
Cline says that the coaches were quick to resort to physical abuse.
“I was warming up.” [for a standing split]He got really annoyed at the tightness in my hamstring.
“He said something along these lines: “You’re just pretending, trying to get out doing this stretch.” So he turned me around and grabbed my leg, forcing it behind my ears.
Cline recalls the primal screams of Cline and the blinding pain. He describes the sensation to be “excruciating”.
She says, “It snapped off my hamstring completely” and that it also took part my pelvis with itself.
Cline claims that her coach did not offer any apology or remorse when her sensory receptors started to register the piercing pain.
“He was angry. He screamed at my face,” Cline says, adding that Cline also accused her lying and tried not to take any responsibility for her injuries.
“There was no offer for medical treatment. No one called my family. She says that I ended up walking to the changeroom by myself and calling my parents to transport me to the hospital.
CNN reached out to Cline’s former coaches. It is believed that they have left Canada.
Multiple requests for comment were made via email and to their Facebook pages. However, no response has been received.
Cline was a young teenager when she began to get used to a hard schedule and suffered painful injuries. She says she broke her hand three times and tore a muscle in the spine, leaving her with a clot as big as a baseball.
Cline would go to school in the morning and then train from noon until 6 p.m., before finishing up with homework in the evening. Cline often spent 30 hours a week at the gym.
She recalls that her coach helped her to hyperextend her knees so that they didn’t buckle on landing.
Lashin would be able to sit on her knees for several hours with her feet elevated on a box. She estimates that he was around 200 lbs.
‘Always being yelled to’
A few years later Cassidy Jones (nee Janzen), joined the same gym.
CNN asked her about the culture of abuse she recalled. She said she remembered Cline’s hamstring injury, and that she was always yelled to.
Jones was soon in danger. Jones described a back-handspring she had struggled to master on the balance beam when she was a child. She was told that one more failure would result in her having to do it from a higher height.
She said, “I’m terrified and crying my eyes out.” Jones thought she might be able to position padded mats beneath the beam to reduce the risk. However, her coaches ruled against Jones.
“I tried, when I was a 10-year-old to do the right things and keep myself safe.”
Shortly thereafter, her body began to twist on the beam, resulting into three spiral fractures in her leg.
Jones said that Jones fell and told Jones to get up again. “I couldn’t, evidently, because my bones had split in multiple places. They left me on the ground for an hour because they thought I was faking it. They told me that I had to get out of their way so that others could use the beam.
Jones claims her body went into shock. “I had goosebumps. I was shaking and shivering, I was so cold,” Jones said.
Finally, her mom was called. She was driven to the hospital. Her leg received a complete-leg cast and she was confined to a wheelchair for many months.
After two weeks, the coaches called their family. “Mom thought it would be to check on me,” she stated. “But it was to blame myself, they were yelling to my mom on the telephone, ‘She should’ve been able to do that, she hurt herself. It’s not our fault.”
Jones sued her coaches in 2011 and was awarded damages in a settlement. She stopped gymnastics immediately after the fall and believes she was fortunate to have been able to escape some of the agony that might have ensued if her coaches had not intervened.
She says that she was seven years old when she began following the unspoken code of gym and tried to vomit before daily weighing sessions.
She says that 15 years later, she still has a nightmare. It’s the feeling that she’s arguing to Vladimir Lashin.
“It’s out of character for my because I don’t raise the volume, I’m very controlled. I don’t know what we’re yelling at, but I’m yelling like mad, and I can’t shout over him. I can’t yell loudly enough.”
Forced to stand on the scales
Cline said that even though her hamstring had snapped, she was still expected and expected to train for at least three to four hours each day.
Named after Natalia Yurchenko, a Soviet gymnast, the move involves a backhand spring onto a vault. Any kind of misstep could be fatal.
She recalled that “I think I laughed,” he said. “I thought it was funny because he would expect me to do this while I was still hurt — I hadn’t been vaulting for several weeks.”
Cline says that she begged him to help her with the vault, but he reluctantly recognized her. She says, “Even though it was almost a complete disaster, I landed pretty much face-first.”
Cline reports that Lashin then demanded that she try it again without assistance. She claims she was scared, but she didn’t feel like she could refuse.
Cline adds, “It was disastrous. My feet didn’t touch the springboard properly, so my momentum didn’t allow me to get up onto vault and I didn’t have enough momentum for the final rotation.” “I landed on the neck.”
Cline said that they fell onto a relatively hard surface because they were using competition mats.
She continues, “I had to assess whether I could still move my legs,” she says. “Fortunately, I was able to, but then I realized he was still screaming at my and telling me to do it over and over again. It was impossible for me to say no to this request.”
Cline said her neck was in pain when she attempted the vault in gymnastics.
“I totally missed one hand off of the vault and landed on top of my head again. I was in tears in the change room with ice covering my neck when he demanded I get back on the floor.
“Then he forced me to stand on the scale and grabbed me by the arm. “This is why you can’t do it!” He asked me about Easter candy I had eaten.
Cline claims that she suffered a final humiliation while spinning through the air on the final, ill-fated vault. However, she had a moment’s clarity and decided to quit the sport out of self-preservation.
Her hopes of competing at the Olympics were shattered and her gymnastics career was over. It would be a lifetime filled with debilitating pain, psychological torture, and the sport she loved.
She was only 13 years old.
He will spend the rest his life in prison after pleading guilty to child pornography charges and several sexual assault charges in 2017. More than 368 gymnasts have come forward to claim sexual abuse in gymnastics programs across the nation, in a scandal that dates back over two decades.
Similarly, other national teams began to confront their abusive cultures around the same time.
Independent review of the sport revealed that Tony Compier, Gymnastics New Zealand’s Chief Executive, had admitted to “emotional abuse”, body shaming and physically abusive training practices, harassment, bullying” in February 2021.
Two weeks later, a class-action lawsuit was filed against British Gymnastics coaches for alleged psychological and physical abuse of athletes as young at six years.
Hausfeld, the law firm representing them, stated to CNN that they are currently working with 38 athletes, four Olympians and are in direct negotiations with British Gymnastics.
The Australian Human Rights Commission found that gymnastics in Australia contributed to a “high risk environment for abuse” in May 2021.
The report revealed evidence of bullying, harassment, abuse and neglect, racism and sexism. This was enabled by a win-at-all costs approach, the young age and inherent power imbalances of female gymnasts, a culture that controls, and an overarching tolerance for negative behavior.
In September 2013, the Swiss national program’s trainers resigned in masse following an ethics investigation that found athletes had complained of psychological abuse and poor performances.
Canadian gymnastics now faces its own moment of reckoning
Cline is the representative plaintiff of a class action lawsuit that has been filed against Gymnastics Canada as well as half a dozen province governing bodies, including Gymnastics BC. This would have overseen the gym that Cline claims was so damaged.
Svetlana and Vladimir Lashin, though not named as defendants, are named in the lawsuit’s allegations. It details Vladimir’s vaulting injury incident, “almost daily…physical violence… inextricably tied to a cultural of psychological abuse” (inappropriate physical contact).
The lawsuit also claims that Svetlana, Vladimir, and Svetlana were not punished for their abuse behavior. Gymnastics Canada and Gymnastics Canada rewarded them.
The lawsuit claims that Vladimir was named as a coach for Team Canada in the 2004 Olympics in Athens. He was then promoted in 2009 to National Coach/High-Performance Director in Women’s Artistic Gymnastics.
According to the lawsuit, several Canadian gymnasts brought forward complaints “spanning many decades,” alleging “sexuality and physical abuse as well as institutional complicity that has allowed the culture of mistreatment to continue.”
The suit is the initial stage in a complex legal process. It can escalate rapidly and take years to resolve.
CNN’s Cline stated that “we really need these institutions held accountable for systemic abuses that they’ve allowed for decades.”
“We are trying to send a message to say that you will not allow these things to continue and that you will be held responsible for them.”
Cline believes that hundreds more former athletes could be eligible for compensation.
Gymnastics Canada responded with a statement saying: “While we are saddened that so many athletes feel we failed to address those issues, we are committed continuing to educate and advocate system-wide reforms to ensure that all participants feel safe and respected when competing and training in sport.”
Nearly all of those surveyed say they have suffered physical and/or mental abuse. However, there are also survivors who have been subject to sexual assault.
Cline said, “We know that there are many people who have been subject to sexual abuse.” “Unfortunately, it’s a component, and we know that its quite significant.”
Gymnastics BC stated in a statement that they knew of the allegations and took them seriously after Wednesday’s lawsuit filing.
Gymnastics BC also stated that it had created a Safety Officer position in early 2020 to “educate our community on maintaining safe sport environments for all”. It also announced that the organization had approved a new complaint handling handbook in June 2021.
Gymnastics Canada stated that while it had not been served with the suit, it still took the allegations “very seriously” and was “committed “to providing a safe environment for our athletes.”
Cline said that she was overwhelmed with messages from athletes from all over the country after sharing her story of her life as a young gymnast, in a 2020 blog.
She has also spoken to survivors from all corners of the globe.
She said that if you put our stories side-by-side and removed our names, you wouldn’t be in a position to tell who’s who. We have a serious problem, not only within Canada, but in gymnastics as a whole.
Cline believes that athletes are so vulnerable because they are young when they begin training.
She spent more time with her coach than her parents and says that athletes were specifically told not to tell their stories in the gym to her family. A culture of silence was encouraged.
Cline says, “We were advised on how to avoid speaking to our parents about this, and it was made very clear that we would get in serious trouble if our parents found out what was happening,”
“If these kinds of things were happening at a school, or at a house, there would be severe consequences almost immediately.
“But for some strange reason, when we place it in the context a sport and especially gymnastics, we normalize this to such an extent that we completely lose track of the fact that it is child cruelty.” This is child abuse.
Although it’s been almost 20 years since Cline quit the sport she loved, Cline still finds herself suffering from its effects — both physically and emotionally.
She has had debilitating back problems since she was 14 years old, and she has arthritis in her neck. She also says she has nightmares and is constantly at the edge of an eating disorder.
She says, “I don’t weigh myself,” and that she can’t get on a scale. I always ask the doctor not to give me the number, even if they are at the doctor. It has required constant monitoring to ensure I am not falling into dangerous eating habits.
“I’ve spoken to dozens and dozens girls and boys, and they struggle in adulthood, regardless of whether it’s eating disorders, PTSD, depression or self-harm addiction.
“And, of coarse, the debilitating pain. This doesn’t stop when someone quits the sport. It’s something that will continue to plague these people for their entire lives.”
Cline admits that gymnastics is prone to injury. However, she believes that healthy training methods can help minimize such injuries.
She also doesn’t believe that the psychological trauma of the sport should be an inherent part of it. She says, “Elite sport can be hard, but it shouldn’t ever cause eating disorders, self harm, or PTSD.”
