The Sunday Times December 19, 2021 19Tilen. Two years older, Tilen got Tadej
into cycling. Their sibling rivalry was
intense. “Tilen was a very good rider,
very fast. He always found a way to
beat me. Every village sign, we
sprinted to and he won,” he says.
“Then one day, when he was 16 or 17,
[he] didn’t want to do it any more.
“You are brothers, you have the
same parents, the same talent. And
there are little things that make a dif-
ference and you don’t even know
what they are. My brother is now the
logistics guy for a haulage company in
Ljubljana and enjoys his job. I grew up
knowing he was better than me.”
Early in that first season on the
World Tour, just after the Basque
Lonely at the top:
Pogacar descends
from Mont Ventoux
in the Yellow Jersey
on his way to a
second successive
Tour win that has
brought Merckx
comparisonsLast week was a watershed for
gymnastics. On Monday more than
500 women and girls who
experienced abuse at the hands of
the former United States team doctor
Larry Nassar reached a settlement
with USA Gymnastics worth
£287 million, ending more than five
years of legal work and campaigning.
It is an important, if painful,
landmark, but gymnasts around the
world know that it is far from the end
of this story. “To move forward we
have to make sure that this never
happens again — on the Olympic
team or at the lowest-level gyms,”
Rachael Denhollander, the first
Nassar survivor to go public with her
allegations, said.
Now a 37-year-old lawyer, she was
also involved in negotiating the
settlement. “We owe it to the
survivors, but also to the future
gymnasts, to do the best that we can
do to protect them.”
It is a daunting task, a hope for a
legacy that will take — and has
already taken — several generations
of women to create. Denhollander
herself was abused by Nassar more
than two decades ago.
Watching the verdict from the UK
was Claire Heafford, co-founder and
campaign director for Gymnasts for
Change, an organisation that is
seeking to end abuse in the sport and
which has become a leading voice for
survivors of abuse in Britain. She said
it was a historic moment.
Heafford has been campaigning
relentlessly since the summer, when
revelations of emotional and physical
abuse in the American system
prompted British gymnasts to begin
coming forward with their own
allegations of maltreatment. What
began as a social-
media hashtag
spiralled into a
movement that has
led to gymnasts
taking legal action
against British
Gymnastics (BG).
About 40 of
them are
in the
process of
alternative
dispute
resolution
with BG and
it is thoughtthat the two sides could reach a
settlement by the spring. As part of
the US settlement, gymnasts have
demanded nonmonetary provisions,
including that an independent body
assesses what went wrong with the
Nassar case. Heafford said she
expects there will be a “second wave”
of activism in the US in which
survivors continue to work to change
the culture of the sport for future
generations.
She is leading the charge for that
on this side of the pond and is finally
hopeful that the sport is moving in
the right direction. “Change is
inevitable now,” she said. “We have
seen some really encouraging signs
from the new leadership team [at
BG]. I’m feeling optimistic that we are
about to enter into a new era.”
The most important moment for
the sport in the UK is likely to come in
February or March, when the
publication of the Whyte review, an
independent report into the
allegations of abuse, is expected.
Anne Whyte QC, the reviewer, said
this year that she had received
evidence from nearly 400
individuals, covering more than 90
clubs and 100 coaches, and that more
than 3,500 complaints had been
submitted to BG since 2008. Some
former gymnasts expect the final
report to be damning.
“If BG is able to respond to the
Whyte review, enact all of the
recommendations very quickly, and
go beyond whatever is recommended
and be really forward-thinking about
what happens next, there is a chance
that BG can survive, move forward,
and we’ll have a very different sport
in ten years’ time,” Heafford said.
Interestingly, the UK is then due to
stage the World Championships in
Liverpool in the autumn, months
after the Whyte review could lay bare
the painful reality of competing and
training in the sport in the UK. “I feel
hopeful that there is an opportunity
for us to take the lead, with the World
Championships coming,” Heafford
said.
She is also mindful of the impact
that championships can have on
former athletes who are processing
abuse. “During the Olympics, a lot of
gymnasts around the world were
pretty triggered. For gymnasts in the
UK, it will probably bring up a lot of
trauma. A lot will need to change
before we can celebrate a
championships in the UK.”
Heafford is adamant that change
must include training coaches to
treat athletes better, as well as
condemning past malpractice. She
also knows that gymnastics is part of
a wider conversation, particularly
pertinent during the Tokyo Olympics
this year, about athlete welfare and
the prioritisation of medals over
mental health.
The settlement in the US and the
activism of gymnasts around the
world can, Heafford believes, change
that. “It’s monumental for
gymnastics but it is also a huge step
forward for athlete rights, full stop. If
we get this kind of seismic change in
gymnastics, there will be a domino
effect in other sports where these
kind of issues will come to light.”US scandal paves way
for justice in Britain
Hopes of bright future
but damning report of
widespread abuse has
to be acted on strongly
REBECCA
MYERSTour, Pogacar went to the Tour of
California. By then San Millán thought
one of the keys to the young rider’s
performance level was his recovery.
“When he was in America, we ran the
tests because we could see he doesn’t
have the same fatigue as the others,”
San Millán says. “We looked at his lac-
tate levels, glycogen levels, and what
we saw was a guy at a whole different
level to everyone else.”
That ability to recover quickly
underpins his remarkable consist-
ency. In his three seasons at the high-
est level, he has won many of the big-
gest races and retained the Yellow
Jersey this year. Eddy Merckx, the
greatest of all time, has seen someone
that reminds him of his younger self.
“I have heard many times, ‘This is
the new Merckx’ without the condi-
tions being fulfilled,” the Belgian said
in October, “but with Tadej I think we
are there this time. He is 23 and has
already won the Tour de France
twice. Incredible. At 24, I had not even
won the Tour. He is still at the begin-
ning of his career, but he is doing bet-
ter than me in some races. He is a
great champion and we are going to
enjoy him for many years to come.”
Can we be confident that Pogacar
wins without doping? There is no evi-
dence to suggest otherwise. His con-
sistency runs counter to the well-
understood profiles of past dopers
who targeted particular races and
geared their preparation for certain
points in the season. If you believe
today’s riders are cleaner than their
predecessors, it is easy to see Pogacar
as the flag bearer for the new genera-
tion.
In Code Yellow, a fly-on-the-wall
documentary about Jumbo-Visma’s
2020 Tour campaign, Roglic and
team-mate Tom Dumoulin raised
questions about Pogacar’s race-win-
ning time-trial performance. Dumou-
lin talked about Pogacar riding his
time-trial bike “like a miner” and still
winning by 1min 21sec, while Roglic
said he didn’t understand how Poga-
car could go so fast. The documentary
was released a year ago. Pogacar
watched it.
“It hurt,” he says. “At first I didn’t
understand, but now I do. When peo-
ple are angry and disappointed, they
are not thinking straight. They say
things that aren’t right but in that
moment, after the time-trial, anyone
could be like that. If I’d been in their
position, I would never have put it
into the documentary. It wasn’t the
nicest thing to put out there.
“But it gave me a lot of motivation
for 2021. I was going to prove I’m not a
miner and I am a proper rider who
can keep winning races. Every race I
went to, I wanted to prove I am a good
rider. I even went to a wind tunnel to
try to get a better time-trial position,
to look less like a miner. I did but it
wasn’t right for me. At the 2021 Tour, I
went back to my old position and won
the first time-trial. It doesn’t matter
how you look, it’s about how much
power you can generate.”
His big target for 2022 is a third
Tour triumph. Should be suc-
ceed, he will have three Tour vic-
tories at an age before Merckx
won his first. That would be some-
thing. Beyond that, there’s another
dream. “The women’s Tour starts the
day the men’s race ends. If Urska is
riding, I would like to spend a few days
following in a camper van, standing
on the roadside, supporting her as she
has supported me. I’ve never done it
but I think I’d love the camper-van
lifestyle.”YOUNGEST WINNERS OF TOUR DE FRANCE
Henri Cornet (France), 1904
Tadej Pogacar (Slovenia), 2020
François Faber (Luxembourg), 1909
Egan Bernal (Colombia), 2019
Octave Lapize (France), 1910
19y 352d21y 364d22y 187d22y 196d22y 280dALEX BROADWAYOWN
ON
HIS
GYMNASTICS
Simone Biles
testified in the
Nassar case