Anastasia: Allison Forsyth lives and works at the forefront of the most painful issue in high performance sport.

The Canadian Olympic Alpine skier was sexually abused by a coach, and the experience led her to apply all her energy and intellect to the prevention of further abuse in sport.

Athletes, coaches, teams, and entire sporting organizations come to her for her expertise in safe sport, and let me tell you- they are in good hands.

This won't be the most breezy episode of our podcast, but if you have even a flicker of concern about an athlete and coach relationship, you won't regret listening in.

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It's Player's Own Voice. I'm Anastasia Bucsis

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Alison, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with me today. I am such a fan. I have got so much respect, but I know that we're going to have a little bit of a heavier conversation. So just to start off, you've had such a formidable career. When you look back on your accomplishments, however, can you truly celebrate them or are they just so entangled with the obvious?

Allison Forsyth: Oh, well, thank you for that. Right off the hop, excellent question. Yeah. You know, I am a survivor of sexual abuse within the sports system here in Canada. Egregious abuse that resulted in a criminal trial. You know, I have so many incredible memories from sport. And then I think it's about choice. And I think the choice that I have made is to appreciate all of the incredible things that happened, to learn from those things that were not so incredible, as I think many athletes can attest to with the culture of sport being what it is still and what it was back in my day. But I make a choice to accept and to move forward.

And the biggest choice I make, I would say, is to heal through helping others to prevent abuse in our country. And I think this probably is stating the obvious with three little hockey players in my family very intent on them, focusing on their awesome experience. So I love sport. I have my kids in competitive sport. I still highly encourage people to put their children in competitive sport. We just need to shift and we need to be smarter.

Anastasia: So you said it. You've got three little ones who play hockey. How do you reassure yourself that they are safe, given all the headlines and all the news that's coming out of that sport right now?

Allison Forsyth: Yeah, absolutely. I think the thing with hockey that I want, you know: everyone should acknowledge, parents, is that they have a culture. Like every sport has a culture. And when we deal with what I and my company ITP deals with, is abuse in sport. There's many forms of abuse. So I only share this because we all know that happened in hockey as far as an incident or a series of incidences is unfortunately the tip of the iceberg within the culture. And every sport has a culture that needs to shift right now. And I'm always a very honest, transparent person.

I do watch closely what teams my kids are on, who they're being coached by, the style of coaching. And to be frank, that's the number one thing parents should be watching for.

We see a lot of psychological abusive coaching in hockey. And the interesting thing that I just really want to stress is I don't say more often than not, but it's not intentional. It's, you know, it's a way that these coaches were coached themselves, whether that's berating, yelling, negative reinforcement, cursing, and they're just repeating the pattern. So I really believe that there is an opportunity to re-educate and deprogram some of the not so healthy aspects out of the sport of hockey. And parents just need to be smart.

And the last thing I'll share on this is I also see parents who put up with things they shouldn't put up with for the sake of getting their kid on a team. So my challenge to parents around that is it's not worth it. I think you could attest to this. Many, you know, Olympians and high level athletes would say, you know, being treated a certain way or having a horrible experience in sport just for that gold medal does not make it worth it. So, parents, we need to calm down a little bit, too.

Anastasia: 100%. Thank you for even saying that. It isn't worth it if you're living through abuse. Now, let's just start with how do you tailor your message to high-performance athletes? Because I, having been a speed skater, you know, being a product of the system, there is so much that I rationalised away of - that's just how it is. That's just how sport is.

Allison Forsyth: So I think something that's interesting and I won't back this up too far is you know it's been scientifically proven in research that when you're a high performing even child athlete by the age of around ten or 11 and I'm sure you'll know what I'm talking about very quickly and everyone listening, you start to collapse who you are with, what you do. And your identity as a cool little kid who makes mistakes starts to not exist anymore and how you feel about yourself -and I get shivers and almost tears just thinking about this- gets directly correlated to your performance as an athlete. So all this to be said is we then get funnelled up usually outside of regular society, which is a problem on its own. We get put on these H-P pathways and as far as the vulnerability to abuse, it becomes extraordinary because we are outside of regular life. We are in a micro environment and mentality. Speed skating is what I know. I've trained with your, you know, some of the older speed skaters in my generation. It is everything to you and skiing was everything to me. My confidence came from my results. So as far as maltreatment and abuse goes, we don't see it, consciously, because we don't live anywhere but where we live and we get very conditioned and used to treatment that we brush off and say, Oh well, that's just speed skating or or that's just hockey, or This is just what I need to take in order to win. And winning is all that matters. So when I speak to high performance athletes, the biggest thing I stress is just acknowledge that you do live in this and there's no getting out of it and that you need to be aware, and start to think about other sectors of society where it would not be put up with.

I'll say to a coach who is, you know, maybe, you know, has been yelling excessively at children and I'm responsible to educate this person. I say, would you want your child's teacher to yell at your child for getting eight out of ten on a math test and scream in their face and they go, oh, there's like an awakening to sport is different. But when it comes to abuse and maltreatment, it's absolutely should not be different. You know, there's no room for it. So, yeah. (6:00)

Anastasia: What would you say to an athlete who has been abused and they're struggling to reconcile with how this all came about? Because I think we both know individuals that have been groomed and you just kind of wake up one day going, how did this happen to me?

Allison Forsyth: Wow. I with my story. You know, just quickly, I dealt with a very, very overt cover up of my abuse. So for 17 years, and I was also the whistle blower. So when we talk about ostracization, you know, when we talk about how hard it is to be the whistle blower, that was my direct experience and the context I share this in, based on your question, is: wow, the self-blame and the "I was responsible for this in some way" can be extraordinary for us. My abuse was sexual, and it's very difficult for me to have reconciled feeling responsible for being sexually abused because I I'll just say it, I wanted to be his favourite. Heck, I had a crush on him. I was convinced I was going to marry this person. And I didn't know that he had also convinced over 12 other girls of the same thing. Right?

So I just want to stress that we are in this position where we will feel responsible because of our vulnerability of wanting to be the best. And it is not our fault when something happens to us. And I had to do years of therapy, work through chronic PTSD around this. So if anyone can take that from me and I offer it, it's not your fault. It's the fault of the perpetrator of the abuse. 7:30

Anastasia: You've given, you know, some tips to parents about looking at coaches and whatnot and identifying problematic behaviour. Are there warning signs? Are there traits of certain people in positions of power that should be noted?

Allison Forsyth: Yeah. So the way that I categorise this is two ways. One is there's predatory abuse within the sport system, which is intentional. I'm a predator. I'm going to come in and do very bad things to athletes. Then there's the normalisation of behaviour abuse, which is more that culture, you know, we've always yelled, we've always ran suicides, we've always done bag skates, we've always done these things.

So I'm not saying it's okay, but it's different. I hope that makes sense. So the warning signs around predatory abuse are pretty clear, right? Grooming has four stages, which is favouritism, personal bond, isolation and complicity. So if you're a parent of a child, you should never be encouraging. And this happens - for that coach to pay more attention to your child than anyone else. You should also never be convinced of what can happen, which is 'just give me your child'. I mean that metaphorically. Obviously, 'if I have your child under my coaching, they will be the best. Trust me. 'Because these predators groom everyone. They will. My predator groomed my parents. My predator groomed our you know, they groomed the gatekeepers around the victim. So you need to watch out for favouritism. If the coaches are texting your children, having conversations with your children that are not about sport, buying gifts, keeping secrets. These are all examples of grooming behaviour. How your child could potentially react is withdrawn. Physical attributes, you know, hair loss, losing friends because suddenly they're now the favoured one. So that's the predatory stuff.

Now what I will say to athletes, and this is good for parents to know as well. One of the things that I hear from athletes is a lot of what I take, as you know, is from talking to victims all the time is they'll realise they may be psychologically abused by their coach as an example when they feel like they're only playing out of fear of their coach, like I'm going to get punished or something really bad is going to happen to me if I don't win. So they're driven to succeed from fear, anger, and that is where if that's happening with your child, you will see them suddenly turn and they'll be like, Well, I don't really want to go to practice? Or they become withdrawn. They stop speaking to you and they start to get anxiety and they'll get very nervous before their games. So there are warning signs for all forms of abuse and we have limited time, but, you know, I'm happy to come back and go through the whole list because I love to be able to share this information with everyone.

Anastasia: I think he hit it on the head, though. I mean, I think society has gotten to a point where, of course, we can say Larry Nassar is close to the devil. Right. Like we have drawn that line 100%. The grey zone of sport, you know, psychological abuse, as you said, like once we define it, how do we measure that?

Allison Forsyth: Absolutely. Here's the challenge with this. Trauma does not affect me like it affects you. So we look at psychological abuse by the effects on the victim, not necessarily intent of the perpetrator. So as an example, if I grew up in a household that was full of yelling and I had a father who maybe yelled at me and cursed at me and my coach does the same, it's normalised. I go hunh! I know it sounds strange, but not quite as traumatic. I'm used to that environment. You know, there's a narrative right now where, you know, it's athletes versus everyone else. I just don't I don't agree with that because I do believe the whole sport system needs to work together. Okay. So I just want to go on the record. I know coaches are also in fear right now that something they might do, they might slip up, yell, say something that they were conditioned to say, and their whole life is ruined. So we do have to be careful with that. So there's microaggressions and then there's abuse. And when abuse is repetitive, consistent, constant and of course, there could be a one time offence where something horrific is said to a child or an athlete where. Wow. Okay. But we also need to know that it's not automatically a horrible situation. And what we need to do is we need to identify and stop the behaviours ultimately even before the microaggressions, because it is a progression towards more harm. That was a bit much, but I think you get where I was going with that.

Anastasia: I guess this is a blunt question. I'm not trying to ask an unfair question. Is there ever a time where a coach is justified in yelling at you or, you know, bag skating you for lack of a better term?

Allison Forsyth: Yeah, no, that's a great question. I just had a conversation with someone this morning about this, it looked like. But, Allison, when our athletes show up late and then we make them do X, Y, and Z, which now we consider exercise as a form of punishment. It works. And we're just trying to hold them accountable. So what can happen in this is coaches want to take the easy way out, because if you exercise an athlete as a form of punishment, bag skating, running suicides, you're actually going to, you know, potentially increase their fitness level, which will help your team in the long run.

And it probably will work in the short term. The alternative is to bench your athlete and not give them playing time, which hurts the overall team. Correct. Right. So in a long winded way, what I'll share is that if you are doing excessive exercise for your athletes as conditioning and it's clear what's going to happen and these are how many reps you're going to be doing, and we're not going to be doing this until the first kid drops or vomits or passes out, because these things unfortunately do happen where we do it based on you played horribly. Now skate around the ice and no one's leaving until little Johnny falls down. That is prosecutable bag skating. So again, what we want to do is eliminate any practices that could lead to that egregious form of exercise as a form of punishment. So I challenge every coach there's a better way. And yes, it might hurt your team in the short term, but exercise as a form of punishment is… there's no room for that in 2023.

Anastasia: This conversation has evolved rapidly. Practices and protocols are changing. Policies are changing. But what needs to happen immediately from your perspective, in the Canadian sport landscape?

Allison Forsyth: Yes, absolutely. Okay. So I will say that I feel we have a giant repertoire of solutions, but people are not working together. We're not coming together as a sport system and saying, okay. Governance of national sporting organisations absolutely needs to shift. The biggest thing with this is they have not been held accountable to their practices, regardless of what those are, because I truly believe that the auditing system and the compliance system has not been strong enough. So governance. Now, the biggest thing though, is my gosh, education, education, education and awareness. We need to have empathy and understanding. As I said, that over 80% of and I did not make this up. This is from the Centre for Child Protection. Over 80% of maltreatment and abuse is preventable through concentrated, specific, appropriate education. You're never going to train a predator out of being a predator. But we cannot just write everyone off who is displaying micro-aggressions and boundary transgressions. So our education needs to be better. It is not going to get covered by online training. I'm sorry, I make online training myself. It is baseline and generalised, but we need sport specific, behaviour specific, and culture specific education to break apart that toxic culture in every sport. Just a couple of things to do there.

Anastasia: Just a couple. But one issue that I really have noticed: Band aiding of the system, you know, something comes, oh, we got to tweak this policy. And, you know, instead of actually working on that foundation of respect and safesport, I mean, what are the tools to create that foundational culture of respect and safety for our athletes?

Allison Forsyth: The way it's been ran in the past is exactly what you said. Oh, we got a problem. Make a policy for that. Find me a coach or an athlete that reads the policy. Please. Find me someone who actually knows what those policies are about. Find me a parent who can tell me what the parental code of conduct on their club actually is. We don't prevent through policies. So the sports system in Canada, and this is going to sound strange, but Canada is actually one of the world's leaders in safe sport, even though we look like we're in a You know what show right now because we're addressing the issue.

But if we keep ticking the box, oh, I've done my job. I built a new fancy policy, but oh, I forgot to tell everyone about it or educate on it or share anyone that they're actually under it. Oh, I made everyone do online training. And if you can see me right now, this is online training. I'm looking to the left and I'm clicking a button and I'm watching Netflix. At the same time. It's human nature. So we need to shift from ticking the box. We need to take the policies off the paper and put them into practice. We need to take the education off online and into the face and into the rooms full of these coaches and administrators. And we need to have a bit of grace and patience as we shift.

So I'll just stress that I believe our sport system has been based on do what you got to do to get your money and then go and win some medals and we need to slow it down and we need to build. If you are in an athlete in a sport right now, in a high performing sport in our country, can you tell me what your NSO's values are? Can you tell me what the mission and vision is? And can you tell me how you live that every day? Again, find me an athlete that would say yes. So your values and who you are is a national sporting organisation cannot live on your website. They have to live in practice every day on your field of play. So this is what I do. I just go around and try to get everyone to do that. So come with me. It's fun!

Anastasia: I will. I you know, you know I will come with you. We we spoke. I don't know what, six weeks ago and you had mentioned just how important EDI is to this entire shift. Why is it so important?

Allison Forsyth: Wow. You know, it's this is going to be awesome because I think it was probably just before that where someone was saying to me, you know, E.D.I. and Safesport are different. And I went, What? Yeah, No.

So the foundation of everyone's culture in sport, what creates the amazing, welcoming, inclusive environment is equity, diversity, inclusivity and accessibility for all. It's about the attitudes and beliefs of your sport. It is about being welcoming, transparent, open to every child of every ethnicity, gender identity that wants to come. This is step one in preventing maltreatment, because when we are accepting of people, when we are open and welcome and we don't have a culture of fear or silence or, you know, racism or misogyny, when these cultures are and hockey is bad with this, I will I'm always honest, they have a lot of work to do in this space. They're getting there. But there's a direct correlation between lack of equity, diversity and inclusivity and maltreatment and abuse in sport. And for the obvious reason in safesport, discrimination is one of the forms of maltreatment. How do we get to a place where we don't have to deal with discrimination situations and it all comes back to equity, diversity and inclusivity? 19:30

Anastasia: So where should this conversation go?

Allison Forsyth: What will not fly in our brains and any athletes brains is- well, it's going to take time. We need to have patience. So we've been patient. I've been working on this for five years non-stop, whether it's, you know, 1 am or 8 a.m., this is what I do every day. We need funding, we need money, we need trust in our organisations. Once they pass the test or whatever we need to do to make them set up properly, we need to fuel this with more funding, more discretionary funding, more training, more education. These NSOs are strapped for money and that will never be an excuse, but I just don't think we can wait any longer and I don't think we can go backwards. We know the problem exists. We know it's bad. So let's work on the solution. That would be the biggest thing, you know.

Anastasia: Is your mindset right now? We got to burn this all down. Or do you think we can build from where we're at?

Allison Forsyth: I don't have trust that if we burn it all down, that the right people would come into place to build it back up anywhere different than we are right now. We need the right people. I am the right person. You are the right person. These athletes that live this every day are the right people. We need the right people in the room. Look at the multiple of reports that have already come in. You will see direct examples across every sport based on the recommendations that are coming through. So we need the right people working on it. It needs to be quick and needs way more of an investment. But absolutely, we don't have time to start all over again. We cannot burn our system down and we are close. We are close because we're losing referees. We're losing coaches, we're losing athletes. We're losing the trust of our parents.

Anastasia: I want to end this on a little bit of a positive note. What would you say to people that feel as though they have no agency in this realm? You know, what can people do right now to hopefully move this in the direction that it needs to move?

Allison Forsyth: So if you're an administrator, get out of your ego and into your vulnerability, please. You do not have all the answers. You know, I was pretty vocal about Hockey Canada's leadership, and all I said was, You're not bad people, but you're wrong. It's okay to be wrong. Show your vulnerability and ask for help to change. If you're an athlete, know what maltreatment is. Ask where your training is, where your education is, what policies you have. Ask why you're not being educated. Ask how you submit a complaint. If you're a coach, check yourself. Show the vulnerability that you might not be the best coach ever. And if you're a coach and you ever want to say it's my way or the highway, I'm telling you, you are walking into a whole world of hurt very quickly. If you are a coach who's defending another coach by saying, Oh, he or she is just old school. Huge warning sign, right? So every single one of us has an opportunity to shift within ourselves and within what we can control.

Stop banging on the glass, parents. Stop it. It's your emotions. It's your reactions. It's your showing your children behaviours that you would never want them to do. Your child will not be necessarily happy and healthy just because they make the NHL. So just chill out. That's what I want to say. Chill out! Because you're going to get in trouble if you're not already in trouble. Breathe. Enjoy sport. You know? I'll hippy out on you for it.

Anastasia: You have made my life better. You have made every Canadian athletes life better. And I just hope you know how appreciated you are because I know this work is so often overlooked and not thanked. And just from the bottom of my heart, I want to say thank you.

Allison Forsyth: I appreciate that. I need to hear that every day these days because it's not easy work, as you can imagine. And it's I said to myself, coming into the new year, this is level up Forsyth year. I need to I need to get stronger and we'll all level up together. Insurance chef sport.

Anastasia: I'm here to level up with you.

Allison Forsyth: Let's level Up.

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Safe Sport expert Allison Forsyth connected with me from her home in Southern Ontario and we recorded my side of our chat from inside CBC sports studio in Toronto.

Players Own Voice is available on CBC Listen and everywhere else you get your podcasts

Hashtag players own voice... My handle is Anastasure .

Olivia Pasquarelli edits our audio.

Adam Blinov wrote our theme music.

David Giddens is our producer.

Thanks for listening.