Coming to grips with a dark past from not that long ago
Ciara McCormack's 2019 blog was a start, not an end, to a discussion long overdue
When Ciara McCormack pressed publish on her blog A Horrific Canadian Soccer Story – The Story No One Wants to Listen To, But Everyone Needs to Hear in early 2019 it started a long overdue conversation about abuse in Canadian sport.
It’s a conversation that started with a very specific situation involving a specific abuser (and now convicted criminal) in the women’s soccer world. A man that had the careers of young women in his hands as a coach and instead of helping them achieve their goals and build them up to be the better people that sport claims it creates, he dragged them down, used them for his own selfish pleasure.
It was sick. He is a sick man* and the system that allowed it to happen is still sick today.
And that’s why we need to keep talking about it. As much as sport professionals want to say incidents like this are isolated and they are restricted to “a few bad apples” that’s simply not the case.
Besides, even if it was the case, finish that old adage. It’s “a few bad apples spoil the bunch.” That doesn’t mean that you dismiss a few bad actors as being irrelevant to whether a system or organization is “good.” No, quite the opposite. It means that even if there are only a few bad apples that you need to throw everything out and start again.
The bunch has been ruined.
Since Ciara made that post she has been tirelessly trying to make that very point. Not just in soccer, but across all sport. If you have been paying attention to the news, you’ll know that gymnastics, bobsleigh and, the biggest of them all, hockey have all been hit with allegations of women not being protected by those organizations. The Hockey Canada scandal is slightly different in that it is about protecting bad behaviour of athletes, but it ultimately speaks to the same core issues that have caused sport to be a space that is not safe for everyone.
Just last week Ciara was on CBC Radio’s As It Happens. The replay of that show can be heard here in its entirety. Her hit is about halfway through.
As she always does, Ciara nicely articulates the problem. Please listen to her directly, but as far as I interpret it, it comes down to an issue of privilege and institutions (in this case Canada Soccer) resisting oversight so that they can retain that privilege.
The problem with this is that it fails to put athlete safety at the forefront of what they do. Sure, they will roll out programs with sharply designed infographs touting how player safety is their biggest priority. It will make a great press release. But, when it comes to actually putting teeth into these ideas there’s very little evidence that they are willing to do much.
Not if it is going to hurt their reputation, bottom line or potentially threaten the positions of their executives. We’ve seen this play out too many times to believe that there is a willingness to make substantive changes without significant external pressure.
Hockey Canada wasn’t going to do anything until the sponsors started to jump ship, right?
To keep this soccer focused, there is a unique opportunity right now with the men about to become the biggest sports story in Canada for two weeks. The instinct of many will be to sweep negatives under the rug. We have so few moments as a soccer community to celebrate that we will be reluctant to air our dirty laundry now.
That is a mistake. A failure to address this would be toxic. All of these issues that are coming out now (player compensation, image rights, CSB secrecy, and the proven abuses that have happened and been covered up) are hard to look at but vital to do so.
We can no longer turn our back on this stuff. We should never have, but it’s always a good time to start to do the right thing.
We need to demand more oversight, less talk and more action.
It’s time to start protecting our athletes and to make sport a safe space for everyone.
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*I won’t be using his name in any copy moving forward now that he has gone through the criminal system.