A RESPONSE TO THE ‘SAFE SPORT REPORT’ 2025

Claire Heafford, CEO of Gymnasts for Change International, and former elite gymnast, responds to the publication of Sarah Powell and Andy Salmon’s ‘Safe Sport Report’ published 24th June 2024.

The “Religion of Sport”
By Claire Heafford

This week, two CEOs of UK sport’s governing bodies, Sarah Powell of British Gymnastics and Andy Salmon of Swim England, released the Safe Sport Project Report, urging the sector to unite behind a bold new vision for athlete welfare, including the creation of an independent complaints and resolution body. I struggled from the outset with the inherent irony of the report. Why? These are the two sports most mired in scandal and named in recent high-profile investigations for systemic failings in safeguarding.

Make no mistake, it’s an urgent call for back up, by sports leaders who have been at the coal face of organisations overwhelmed by complaints. And the trouble with the Report?  The phrase “safe sport” is an oxymoron.

Sport is not “safe”. Sport, by its very nature, is inherently risky. It is ritualised conflict, a preparation for war disguised as entertainment. At the higher levels, it’s about enduring hardship to bond with teammates. It’s about pushing bodies to their limits, mastering pain, and sometimes being broken by it. It is, at its core, about domination: Winning, defeating, outwitting; even cheating- if you can get away with it.

In that sense, sport functions a lot like religion. It asks for belief, sacrifice, and devotion from its congregations. It offers meaning and ritual, heroes and villains, and promises redemption through pain. And like religion, it can blind us to harm done in its name. So, when politicians and governing bodies talk about making sport “safe,” we must ask: do they truly understand what sport is, particularly at elite levels?

If sport carries risk, what kind of risk are we really talking about? The risk of physical injury, of course. But also, the quieter, longer-lasting kinds: The erosion of mental health; the loss of identity after retirement; the psychological toll of constant performance pressure; not to mention the emotional impact of abuse, discrimination and neglect.

British athletes and Olympians like swimmer Adam Peaty, cyclist Victoria Pendleton, and gymnast Ellie Downie have spoken openly about the mental strain of elite sport, with badminton star Gail Emms describing feeling “broken” and abandoned by the system after retirement. These are not stories of weakness, they are warnings that the current model of sport often demands more of athletes than it gives back.

The psychological toll is compounded by discrimination and exclusion. In cricket, Azeem Rafiq’s powerful testimony of racism was a watershed moment for the sport, culminating in the 2023 Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) report, which exposed systemic racism, classism, and sexism across all levels of the game. And in rugby, players like Luther Burrell have highlighted how racist “banter” was normalised within team environments, revealing the harm caused when equity is not respected and prejudice is trivialised or ignored.

So, as scores of athletes have chosen to break the silence of their suffering, across British sport, a common thread emerges: A system where Olympians and professional players are worshipped like gods, with personhood sacrificed at the altar of the religion of sport. As such, athletes find themselves in a bind: Stay quiet about sport’s damaging side and maintain the mirage of godlike status, or speak out and commit the heresy of admitting you were human after all. The net result? Too many athletes left broken by their sport; too many coaches, officials and sports administrators profiting from protecting the status quo.

In the UK, reports such as The Whyte Review into abuse in gymnastics and The Sheldon Report into the decades-long cover-up of child sexual abuse in football laid bare how governing bodies failed in their duty of care - not out of ignorance, but out of convenience. These investigations tell a sobering story; that beneath the medals and myth-making, sport has repeatedly turned a blind eye to trauma, abuse, and inequality, clinging to its traditions while people suffer the consequences. And this is the paradox at the heart of efforts to build an independent safeguarding body for sport in the UK. On what basis is such an organisation founded, if the very concept of “safe sport” is flawed from the start?

The answer lies in what people really want from such a body. Not a utopia. Not sanitised sport. Just a place they can trust. A place, independent of the sport itself, with the authority to act, to remove abusive coaches, sanction predatory officials, and intervene when power is misused. A body unencumbered by the political interests of national governing bodies or UK Sport. A place of remedy, not PR and sports washing.

And let’s not kid ourselves. The reason many of those same governing bodies and funders now support an independent safeguarding body, has little to do with athlete welfare. It’s more about avoiding scandal. Offloading liability. Keeping the wheels turning when the darker truths of a sport’s culture inevitably surface. A safeguarding organisation, if done poorly, becomes a reputational sponge; there to absorb bad headlines while allowing the system to carry on unchecked.

If we’re serious about this, then it cannot be a box-ticking exercise. It requires a seismic shift, not just in governance, but in values. It demands a government brave enough to take sport seriously as a site of power and harm, and willing to regulate it as such. And it demands we confront the ugly truth that, for all our Olympic pageantry and heritage of fair play, sport in Britain is as vulnerable to abuse, corruption, and exploitation as anywhere else, no different from the church.

And the comparisons with religion don’t end there: Any future safeguarding mechanism must avoid replicating British Gymnastics’ discredited complaints process - a system as devoid of true independence as the internal procedures used by religious institutions to handle historic abuse.

So, if the proposed body is to deliver meaningful accountability, it cannot focus solely on future prevention, as the report repeatedly emphasises; it must also provide resolution and redress for historic cases too. It remains to be seen who will be responsible for setting up and overseeing the training and operations of such an entity, and what the scale and capacity will need to be, to be effective.

I would argue this isn’t just about governance. It’s about identity. We still like to imagine British sport as the land of village greens and gentlemanly cricket matches. But beneath the bunting lies a hunger for power, for superiority, for national status. Sport remains a proxy battlefield. Bigger medals, better athletes, stronger missiles. As Russia’s current exclusion from participation in the Olympics Games shows, the Cold War never really ended, it just changed its costume.

So, what would a safeguarding body worth its name actually look like? It would be built from the ground up, not imposed from above. It would be shaped by the people who live and breathe sport at all levels: Grassroots coaches, volunteers, survivors, and those who’ve witnessed abuse first-hand. It would be governed, not by political appointees, but by those who’ve earned trust in their communities. It would provide remedy as well as regulation.

If I were building it, I’d want to see national governing bodies adopt human rights frameworks across the board, from elite level, down to the smallest local clubs. I’d want safeguarding embedded not just in process, but in a shared cultural language about how we show up on sports fields and in high-performance venues up and down the country. I’d want to see acknowledgement that abuse in sport is a global issue, requiring Safe Sport leaders in the UK to advocate for international reform. And on the home front, I’d want laws changed, regulations tightened, and meaningful consequences for those who fail to protect others. But crucially, I’d want to see such a body campaign for better working conditions for athletes and a new standard for coaching, based not on blind obedience, but mutual respect and science-backed understandings of what it takes to allow an athlete to thrive in sport, rather than simply surviving the strictures of outdated ideas of a “no guts, no glory” nationhood.

But this is fantasy, for now. Because none of this can happen until we reckon honestly with what sport is. Until fans stop pretending their heroes are gods, until we see the human cost of performance, and ask why we demand it, sport will continue to leave a trail of broken athletes and broken kids in its wake. Because like religion, sport commands loyalty- and when that loyalty becomes blind, when institutions are protected over people, when ritual is allowed to obscure reason, belief becomes complicity.

So, is it possible to build something truly different? Not “safe” sport, perhaps; but equitable, abuse-free, rights-respecting sport? Yes. Not quite as catchy, I’ll admit. Perhaps better to leave the quangos to figure the acronyms out.

Claire Heafford is a former elite gymnast and co-founder and CEO of Gymnasts for Change International, a UK-based charity advocating for athlete welfare and systemic reform in the sport of gymnastics.