Becky Downie, who spoke out last year about “an environment of fear and mental abuse” at British Gymnastics, has been controversially left out of the Team GB squad for next month’s Tokyo Olympics.
The 29-year-old, who won a world silver medal on the uneven bars as recently as 2019, was granted an additional trial following the sudden death of her brother Josh last month. But a British Gymnastics selection panel overlooked Downie for a place on the four-strong team and she has not been named among the three reserves.
That decision will raise eyebrows given Downie, who has won 14 major medals for Team GB and England during a glittering career, was so critical of the governing body last year in a devastating statement which said “cruel” behaviour was “so ingrained in our daily lives that it became completely normalised”.
She also described how she had been “trained to the point of physical breakdown” on many occasions, before admitting: “Only in recent years I’ve understood properly the mental impact that’s had upon me.”
“As recently as 2018, and given I was by this point a very senior athlete, I attempted to speak up at a national camp about what I considered was an unsafe approach to my personal training,” she added. “I was shot down, called ‘mentally weak’, and told the injury pain levels I was experiencing were in my head.
“Just 12 days later, at the European championships, my ankle broke down yet again; a direct consequence of the unsafe training I attempted to bring up less than a fortnight earlier.”
Insiders at British Gymnastics insist that Downie’s form had demonstrably dropped in recent months – and that an independent adjudicator agreed with their decision when rejecting Downie’s appeal last Friday.
However Downie’s sister Ellie, who withdrew herself from consideration following the family tragedy, disagreed and tweeted: “I would say it comes as a shock but after how we’ve been treated this year it’s not really,” she tweeted.
An ongoing review into abuse in British gymnastics has received submissions from nearly 400 people, with 39 cases considered so serious they have been passed to local authorities because of child safeguarding reasons or concerns of ongoing criminal conduct.
An interim report by Anne Whyte QC, published in March, also revealed British Gymnastics received 300 complaints a year on average between 2015 and 2020.
The full review, which was set up by UK Sport and Sport England in July 2020 after allegations of abuse at all levels of the sport, is not expected to be completed until after the Tokyo Olympics.