Lilah Drafts-Johnson
Public Voices Fellow for Advancing the Rights of Women and Girls with The OpEd Project and Equality Now. She previously managed the education and prevention components of Major League Baseball’s domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse policies and received her MA in Physical Cultural Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studied the formulation and efficacy of domestic and sexual violence policies in professional U.S. men’s sports leagues.
Email: ldraftsjohnson@gmail.com
Twitter: @lilahdj
Paralympic swimmer Parker Egbert is suing the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) for allegedly endangering his safety by assigning him to room with teammate Robert Griswold during the 2021 Tokyo Paralympics. Despite reports from at least six athletes about Griswold’s inappropriate conduct prior to the Games, Egbert’s lawsuit claims the USOPC did not take action. Griswold, who has cerebral palsy and won two gold medals in the S8 swimming classification in Tokyo, now faces charges of sexually abusing Egbert, who has autism and competed in the S14 classification in 2021.
This case is deeply disturbing, yet it is not the only instance of the dark side of sport rearing its head at the Games. The Dutch Olympic Committee sparked outrage by selecting convicted child rapist Steven van de Velde to compete in beach volleyball at the Paris Olympics. This led Safe Sport International — a UK-based non-profit that aims to end all forms of interpersonal violence, abuse, and harassment in sport — to call for an international framework for safeguarding in sport, including more stringent criteria for the exclusion of individuals who have infringed upon the dignity and autonomy of others from participation in global sporting events.
Concerns about abuse in sport were raised ahead of the Games by the Sports and Rights Alliance (SRA), a global coalition of NGOs and trade unions advocating for stronger protections against harassment, abuse, and exploitation of athletes. The SRA launched the “Hello???” campaign in the week leading up to the Olympics, urging the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to overhaul their existing reporting tool and create a trauma-informed hotline where athletes can seek help and report abuse without fear of retaliation. This campaign came in response to the publication of a report demonstrating that the IOC failed to investigate credible claims of abuse and harassment in the Wrestling Federation of India.
Currently, the IOC has an online reporting tool where athletes can anonymously report instances of sexual abuse or harassment, as well as other integrity violations. However, researchers have expressed concernthat these reporting tools, as well as the investigations process of sport safeguarding efforts, may increase the risk of harm and re-traumatization for athletes using them.
U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athletes have also voiced frustration with the investigations and disciplinary decision-making process involved in reporting a case of abuse or misconduct. All U.S. cases are processed through the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a non-profit organization founded in 2017 through the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act. In a recent interview with Sports Illustrated, CEO Ju’Riese Colón said SafeSport oversees between 11 and 14 million athletes and is on track to receive 9,000 reports this year — all with just a $20 million operating budget, which SafeSport has urged Congress to increase.
SafeSport’s 2024 Athlete Climate Survey reported that approximately 1 in 10 of athletes surveyed had experienced unwanted sexual contact or sexually explicit behaviors during their sports involvement, and more than 2 in 5 who had unwanted sexual experiences reported that at least one of these incidents had occurred before the age of 18. Athletes with disabilities are between two and four times more likely to experience abuse than athletes without disabilities. While prevalence rates of all athletes who have experienced sexual abuse vary between 2% to 49% across studies, elite athletes are at higher risk of abuse.
Some researchers suggest that such high rates of sexual violence in sport could be traced to the prevailing “sport ethic” — a set of norms in sport such as overcoming obstacles and ignoring pain. This culture can gradually train athletes to accept and normalize behavior that would be considered unacceptable outside of sports. The close-knit nature of high-performance sport communities can create barriers to reporting incidents, as ensuring anonymity is difficult and finding a new coach or team can be equally challenging.
During the Olympics, our media feeds are filled with adages about how we love sports for the way they challenge us, the way they bring out our best. However, the events of the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Paris Games demonstrate that we have only just begun to grapple with a pervasive issue that exists alongside the fanfare and spectacle of the Games: the level of abuse currently present in sport. As policy and research efforts continue to make sense of the stories uncovered, it is critical that these endeavors center the well-being, dignity, and voices of survivors. When it comes to challenging our sport systems to improve, there is no finish line in sight and much more than gold medals at stake.
