‘Just eat an apple for dinner’: Former NZ gymnast Belinda Moore on years of pain and depression and the ongoing side effects
Saturday, 1 August 2020
Belinda Moore is a former Commonwealth Games athlete and gymnastics high-flier; years later, she is still coping with its crippling consequences, including ongoing battles with food and weight.
She is speaking out now in the hope it will change the culture of the sport.
“I want to share my story because I don't want others to go through the many years of pain and depression I went through, [because of] my experiences in gymnastics.”
**READ MORE:
* Aussie gymnasts detail abuse: he watched me 'take all my clothes off'
**
Moore, who represented New Zealand in rhythmic gymnastics from the age of 10 and competed at the 1994 Commonwealth Games aged 15, took years to get her self-worth back following her time in the sport that fostered a culture that put aesthetic looks over health.
“To this day, 24 years after I retired at 17, I still deal with fallout from that sport,” she said.
“And speaking to fellow gymnasts I know I'm not alone.
“Severe body dysmorphia, metabolic issues, crippling low self-esteem, low self-worth, rejection and failure issues, depression, anxiety, chronic injury repercussions and a very real sense of having failed in our sport.”
Gymnastics New Zealand chief executive Tony Compier refused to go into detail regarding specific allegations, though he has launched “urgent enquiries” in response to other claims made to Stuff’ as part of an investigation into the sports' culture. Those claims include emotional and physical abuse.
Moore spoke to Stuff about the pressure on athletes to be thin; she has not made any allegations of physical abuse.
She said it was all about the “line” of the body in rhythmic gymnastics and athletes would get marked down or not taken “seriously” by judges if they were deemed to be heavier.
“You have to be lean. That ‘line’ is subjective If someone is too heavy it breaks the ‘line’.
“That’s an issue with the culture of the sport.”
She recalls at 12 years old being told by a coach to “just eat an apple” for dinner.
“I didn’t know what she was implying.”
She said she started being weighed regularly from that age, often in front of others. If the athletes were deemed to be “overweight” they were forced to run around a golf course, she said.
She soon started running on her own volition before weigh-ins, fearing she would be overweight. She’d also start dehydrating herself before weigh-ins, “like a boxer”, she said.
“The weighing was so public. You did it in front of everyone else,” she said.
“It was super shameful. That was the biggest thing … the shame of it.”
It fostered an attitude that if you didn’t exercise, you’d “end up fat”, she said.
“You have to move all the time. Even on your day off.
“Is this about rhythmics any more or is it just about not being fat?”
“It’s insidious … [but] it’s not super overt. You’d do double training on weekends.”
The thing was though, she said, the athletes weren’t fat. They weren’t even overweight, they just weren’t extremely thin like their international counterparts. That, she said, “equals overweight” in gymnastics.
In the months leading up to the 1995 world championships in Austria her weight fluctuated. It was caused by her stepping away from the “rigorous training regime” over the Christmas break, she said. It was the only week of the year she didn’t train.
“It was hard to maintain being underweight because the body was constantly in diet-mode and as soon as you stopped moving and fed it, even just a normal amount, it held onto everything you put in,” she said.
“[It was the] classic yo-yo dieting cycle.”
Gymnastics New Zealand decided not to send her to Egypt for a pre-World Cup meet because of the fluctuation, she claimed.
“[They] said they weren’t going to send me away because ‘we don’t want to harm your image in front of the judges. We don’t want the judges to get a certain idea about you’,” she said.
“[It was] one hundred percent associated with the weight.
“There was no way you would be taken seriously by the international gymnastics community unless you looked a certain way. No one was going to entertain the idea you were a credible gymnast if you were bigger.”
At this time she said she was number two in the country and wasn’t being selected for international tours. This is when isolation set in.
“You’re doing a sport … [and] the line starts to blur. Is my gymnastics not good enough?
“At that age you see it as being all your fault. If I had been skinnier I would have gone [on tour]. That’s what you tell yourself as a kid.”
After that, she went to live with her coach to drop the weight.
She lived with her coach for eight weeks and was weighed morning and night. She lost 10 kilos that time, 13 the next, she said.
“She starved me down while I lived with her,” she said.
“Looking back it’s crazy. But in the thick of it you want results. Which you do get.
“[I now have] a messed up metabolism for the rest of my life because I was so starved.”
Her coach, former Bulgarian rhythmic gymnastics world champion Diliana Georgieva, said she never starved Moore and was trying to help her achieve what Moore wanted to achieve.
“I don’t think I have starved her ever,” she said.
“I was giving her for dinner cottage cheese and beetroot and fruit, making sure she didn’t eat sweets … lollies and cakes. She was eating what we were eating.
“It never crossed my mind I was starving her. I was just trying to help her look better. She had potential. She was super talented.”
During this time, Moore said bad eating habits started to creep in. She was being secretive about what she was eating.
“That’s 101 for eating disorders. What I’ve learnt is you have to address the mental and emotional trauma or the eating doesn’t change.
“It’s nothing to do with the food. It’s all to do with worth. You start to equate your worth with what size you are.
“And that’s the problem because it stops becoming about your sport. It gets really blurry.”
The third time she went to stay with her coach she was “mentally in the thick of the starvation thing”, she said.
She also didn’t have a period for nine months.
“And you don’t care. It’s one less thing to worry about. You’re not thinking long term there could be damage,” she said.
“[You think] ‘right I’m going down the rabbit hole’. I got pretty lean then …[but] mentally I was not well. [I was] quite an angry and bitter person.”
But she said she got the best results of her career overseas following the diet driven by her coach.
“It isn’t just because I was one year older or one year wiser in my training,” she said.
“It was because I was skinner and the judges were like ‘right, we’re going to take you seriously’.”
Georgieva said weight is driven by the global culture associated with the sport.
“I had to make sure they don’t look overweight, or there’s no point [competing],” she said.
“It’s part of the sport. You have to look a specific way. If you want to achieve world-class gymnastics you can’t be a 100kg person. It’s not going to work.
“Once you get to world-class level… it’s about wanting to achieve and wanting to win. If you want to win you have to work hard. It’s not for fun any more.
“Professional sport, I wouldn’t call it fun.”
On returning home from an overseas competition Moore said she was the “darling” of gymnastics in New Zealand. She even received a letter from GNZ congratulating her on her high scores and “rather indelicately applying pressure” for her to beat the Australians at the upcoming Oceania Championships, she said.
It was the only time the organisation had communicated with her during the seven years she represented New Zealand, she claimed.
Gymnastics New Zealand chief executive Tony Compier refused to go into detail regarding specific allegations, though he has launched “urgent enquiries” in response to other claims made to Stuff’ as part of an investigation into the gymnastics culture. Those claims include emotional and physical abuse.
She said the organisation didn’t protect the athletes when she was competing.
“I think the failing on GNZ part was not having those processes and procedures in place that would not only safeguard the gymnasts but also keep GNZ accountable,” she said.
“In our sport we rely on volunteers giving countless hours of their time as there is very little money in gymnastics, so things operate on the smell of an oily rag.
“Nevertheless, we were children in the care of coaches who I'm pretty sure had no safety checks and oftentimes little or no suitable training on how to coach other than their own experience in the sport.”
Moore said she doesn’t have any anger toward her coach. Georgieva had it far worse as an athlete.
“What she used to do to us was 20 percent of what was done to them,” she said.
“ As an adult, you have to choose to move past being a victim and get on with your life.
“It’s tricky though because the things you’re trying to rationalise happened to you when you were just a kid.”
Georgieva confirmed that training was tough for her as an athlete. She said they would start training at 7am, often going until 9pm, with only a short break for school work.
Georgeiva said as an athlete sometimes she would train for up to six hours at a time with no break. Other athletes would be punished if she spoke up, she said.
“All the younger kids had to do double training because I said no to [my coach],” she said.
“We were scared of our coach. She was a very strict person. We knew we couldn’t get away with anything.
“[But] if you want to be number one in the world in whatever sport … it’s obviously tough and you have to do it, but you’re doing it because you want to do it, not because anyone is forcing you to do it.”
She was also weighed regularly as an athlete.
“You have to be 44kg and if you’re not … we used to get punished. Instead of doing five routines I had to do 10 if I was overweight [as an athlete],” she said.
She doesn’t remember weighing her athletes “that much” when she was a coach.
Moore said GNZ also needs to look at where coaches are coming from and what practices they are trying to implement here.
What might be deemed to be acceptable coaching practices in other parts of the world - particularly Eastern Europe - is not acceptable here, she said.
“Gymnastics New Zealand appears to have given them free reign on account of them being gymnastics superstars themselves but the things you can get away with in some countries - enforced starvation, physical and verbal abuse - are not acceptable to most New Zealanders and NZ society I'd say,” she said.
“I don't think GNZ had procedures in place to deal with that and the ones who suffered the most from that negligence on GNZ’s part, were the gymnasts themselves.”
She retired at 17. She still had “a lot of goals and a lot of unfinished business” but decided to stop competing because of the constant pressure to stay skinny and struggled to keep her weight down.
“If I had chosen something like cycling… I would be so much better off because you’re an adult with adult sensibilities and adult reasoning, but the biggest problem with gymnastics is you’re too young.”
Looking back she said the feeling she was left with after competing in the sport, for her country is “shame and failure.” She said gymnastics gave her many positive things including discipline, tenacity, body knowledge and world experience but the negatives far outweigh the positives.
“I have worked very hard over the past 24 years to overcome those things [but] some of them, like body dysmorphia, are going to be things I deal with all my life,” she said.
“It is not too big of a statement to say my experiences in gymnastics completely shaped, for better and for worse, the trajectory of my life.”