Two former skiers are speaking out about the abuse they suffered as children at the hands of a former national ski coach in an effort to create a safe environment for all in sport.
“For myself, it started at 14 years old and my dreams were crushed,” Amélie-Frédérique Gagnon said Friday at a news conference in Calgary.
Bertrand Charest, an ex-national ski coach, was convicted of dozens of sex-related last June and was given a 12-year prison sentence. Geneviève Simard, a two-time Olympic athlete, said Charest first abused her at 12-years-old.
“It was very traumatizing, it crushed my self-esteem, my confidence, it made me doubt all my relationships with future coaches,” Simard said.
“Of course it’s a really sensitive subject, no one wants to talk about a child being abused, but we have to talk about and we have to stop allowing it happen and we need to protect our kids.”
The two are part of a group that’s now calling on Canadian governments to act on the issue. They believe part of the solution is mandating online training that would give all those involved in sport the means to recognize when certain types of abuse are occurring.
“Our best defence is to educate and focus on the 98 per cent of good people to give them the tools and the confidence to ask questions when their gut’s telling them something’s not right,” Sheldon Kennedy, a child abuse survivor and advocate, said Friday.
“We want to have a big impact and make everybody realize what happens, and how it happens, and that it happens too many times,” Gagnon added.
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