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Sexual abuse and skaters' images: one fan's view

I agree with all those who say the USFSA needs to take a more proactive approach to protecting its young skaters and acknowledging that the sport does face problems like sexual abuse and AIDS.

Christine Brennan, for all the controversy she caused with her first skating book and its discussion of AIDS, has strongly called for the USFSA to take a more realistic view of what is going on, at least in that area, to protect the sport's young people from catastrophe. Sexual abuse should be added to that list.

However, to be fair, the reluctance of the skating world in general--an image-obsessed community if there ever was one--to publicly acknowledge the problem is as much to blame as the sport's governing body. When the USFSA did hold seminars on AIDS for young skaters, very few actually attended, and USFSA sponsors tactfully ducked out before the seminar began. Skaters are fearful of being associated with homosexuality, AIDS, or abuse issues, particularly at a young place in their careers; and corporate sponsors are also leery of these issues -- something to which the USFSA, so dependent on ABC and private money, is acutely sensitive.

As much as we hope something will happen, the USFSA is not about to come out and say the sport has a problem with abuse unless it is forced to with a much more provable and immediate case, as it was forced to acknowledge the problem of AIDS (in the end, it could not ignore the hundreds of coaches, choreographers, and male skaters with the disease, and I consider it major progress that ABC did a feature on Brian Wright in its Skate America coverage).

The USFSA has a role to play in making it feasible and possible for skaters at risk to come forward, and in regulating the behavior of its coaches more carefully. But I think that until skaters are allowed to be real people with real problems in the public eye, as are athletes in almost any other sport, it's not going to happen (witness the 100-post [discussion] threads when a skater so much as refuses to sign an autograph, for example!)

We can forgive pro football and basketball players for doing drugs, starting fights, soliciting prostitutes, even attacking their coaches, but no skater is allowed to have even a hint of scandal attached to his or her name without being discussed ad nauseum. That's why they don't come forward when there is a problem, and that's why the USFSA won't acknowledge a problem. It's our artificial standards of conduct and image that we expect from skaters--and that's something we can all help to change.

--A figure skating fan, writing on Figure Skating World (reprinted with author's permission)