Jessica Shuran Yu on athlete abuse: ‘You’re either with us or against us’
- Former Singapore skater who revealed her own experience on Instagram calls on the IOC to do more to stop culture of abuse from the top down
- There would be zero tolerance if they ‘cared about us athletes as people and not just the profit’, she says of Olympics governing body
When former Singapore ice skater Jessica Shuran Yu went public with the abuse she had received from coaches she did not know what to expect.
“People from all over the world left comments and sent me messages saying that they support me, which really helps when it comes to sharing a part of my life that is not only so raw, but still associated with a certain level of shame in my head,” Yu tells the Post.
Some comments were “not as supportive”, she said. “When people try to justify abuse to me as a necessary means to achieve athletic success, it can be quite triggering. However, it also goes to show how normalised abuse still is within sporting culture and, in turn, that proves how drastically we need to change that mindset.
“It proved to me that these types of difficult conversations absolutely need to be happening right now, and publicly too, because pressure is what allows for reform.”
Yu, who was born and raised in Beijing to a Chinese mother and Singaporean father, was trained in the Chinese capital. She went public on Instagram of the abuse she underwent there, she said, because of the Netflix documentary Athlete A, which looked at the systemic abuse in US Gymnastics.