hi, i'm lisa fletcher, and you are in "the stream." no question olympic hopefuls endure years of gruelling training, but behind the scenes many say they are suffering abuse at the hands of their coaches. we discuss the dark side to the olympics. ♪ omar is in tonight as digital producer. we'll be bringing in all of your live questions and comments throughout the show. i think there is a tendency and to look at the olympic environment and think it is very

structured disciplined and very safe, and there are a number of athletes saying it is not. >> absolutely. here on my screen jonathan says . . . of course for those of you at home we want to be part of the conversation to be sure to tweet in using the hashtag you see on your screen now. >> some athletes say physical, psychological and sexual abuse are part of the equation.

elite athletes are coming forward with allegations. just a little over a year ago 19 speed skaters, including five olympic medalists filed complaints. a few national gof earning bodies have stepped up to declare zero tolerance for such behavior, but some adz woe indicates question whether inconsistent guidelines are enough? they say the winning at all costs mentality has taken over, making athletes less likely to report abuse. joining us is katherine star, two-time olympian and current president of safe for athletes. in chicago, john little an attorney who handles many sexual abuse cases for olympic athletes. and mitch abrams a sports

psychologist who has worked extensively with athletes who face these abuses. welcome even to "the stream." katherine coaches push athletes to try harder. that's their job. they yell, and put you through growling workouts. but at whatting point does hard core tough coaching become abusive? >> one of the things about being an elite athlete is you excel on your own. and you have an balanced relationship between your coach and yourself, and if you are in a dynamic where the coach is saying they made you, then you have really lost both your -- the equality in that relationship. and then you create a dynamic that is extremely dysfunctional, and moves into that extremely abuse environment. >> talk about what that environment was like for you.

>> well, i mean for me the abuse was psychologically abusive, mentally abusive, and i had to deal with -- my -- my family -- my father was an amazing man, and how he supported me as a swimmer was absolutely amazing, and to go to him with my -- you know, like you are supposed to go to your papers, you know, with your pain and your hurt to help you through that, and, you know, to sort of have, you know, their way of help you, you know, sort of like don't quit -- i have a letter i found from 30 years ago from my father that specifically says i'm sorry for your sadness, but you really need to like learn to get along, and he meant well, but there wasn't a vehicle and a way to express any of that hurt or psychological abuse, so you sort of stayed with it, and your peers, your, you know, 14,

15-year-old teammates are the ones who help you through your struggles, because you are in the same place. >> john -- i'm sorry, finish, katherine. >> oh, no. it's all. >> john you are an attorney and deal with lot of these elite athletes. katherine made a good point. we are really talking about kids here a lot of times. 13 to 17 year olds. give me a sense of some of the more egregious abuse allegations that your clients have brought to you? >> well, first of all katherine said it the best -- the coach -- his ego, he shouldn't be saying things like i made you. i'm responsible for your success. the athlete is responsible for their success, and the parents dna is a contributor to their success. i have seen instances where

coaches have locked athletes in their hotel rooms because they did not perform well, and jarred the door so the athlete couldn't get out. i have seen coaches abuse athletes at the olympic training center, an environment that you would think would be safe. i have seen all kinds of things -- throwing things at kids, hitting kids, what you saw in the speed skating incidents from last year, where the coaches were actually assaulting athletes. but the sad part is when you look at what .hahhed with speed skating, the national governing body failed to act, and we have from olympians down to little kids participating in the sport right now, there's no responsibility. coaches have no one to answer to. they can do what they -- what they will, and as long as they are successful on the playing field, there will be no scrutiny to their methods. >> i want to get to that

accountability and failure to act in just a second, but mitch do these abuses generally concentrate among a particular age or gender? >> i think considering the developmental age of the younger athletes that are involved, olympic athletes have a wide range of ages and developmental stages that they are going through, and i think it would be a mistake to assume that a governing body is going to be able to enforce the rules the way they need to be done, and accountability has to fall on all participants. certainly the governing bodies matter, but parents have to be more involved in not just handing over their children to coaches and assuming everything is going to be copacetic. >> i agree that parents do have responsibility, but the problem we have currently in u.s.

olympic sports which for the record would be 42 sports from soccer to football to, you know, field hockey, any number of sports. what we have is a system where abuses and allegations are not documented or if they are documented they are kept from parents and clubs at the lower level, so the people don't know the new coach in town has a history from new jersey or indianapolis. those lists that are kept prevent parents from having all of the knowledge they need to make informed digs. >> lisa -- we have a comment from our community where this line is drawn between encouraging coaching and where that line crosses into abuse. and we have some interesting reaction to that . . .

katherine, given the fact that there is a subjective angle to a emotional abuse, do you think that makes it difficult to set specific standards about what kind of behavior coaches can engage in and what they cannot? >> i really think you have got to allow athletes to have a voice. and i'm an advocate for -- if -- if it feels wrong it is wrong, and an athlete has got to be able to say that it's not -- i'm not okay with this. and there's just no room for that if we have such a system especially in gymnastics where the next athlete is going to step in line. and -- and i feel like one of the -- so that's where the -- like you continue to abuse yourself because you are really not going to be accommodated, so wily in this fear and intestimony a decision

environment where we need to start changing that to inspiration and empowerment, and allow our athletes to be vocal about how they can succeed within who they are. allow them to share that part of their experience, and, you know, i just find there's way too much power, and because they are minors they are negated and not considered as -- as having any value to the conversation, yet these are children who have excelled beyond belief, and even just being in sports in general, just participation, we want to teach our young athletes how to communicate in a way that is helpful for them to improve in all aspects. >> katherine it's very disturbing and not uncommon for psychological abuse to lead to sexual abuse. we'll talk about that when we come back. keep tweeting us we'll get to

those after the break.

♪ we're back discussing the abuse some athletes face on their olympic journey in sports there is actually a greater prevalence of sexual abuse at the elite level. john i asked you to give us some of the worst examples of physical and psychological abuse. let's talk about some of the most egregious sexual abuse. >> yes, unfortunately i have had

underage clients perform oral sex on coaches. i have had athletes who have been raped overseas. i have had athletes who have been sexually assaulted at the olympic training center. and that's in taiwan doe, when you look at speed skating, i have had athletes who have been abused by known predators, and again, in usa swimming, several coaches who have abused athletes in the united states and across the globe, and unfortunately a lot of those coaches have not been banned from coaching. >> i want to introduce nancy, senior director of advocacy at the women's sports foundation. my gosh, nancy, you think of any one thing that john just brought up, and you would think those would be making global headlines, yet we don't hear about these stories. why not? >> well, a couple of reasons,

one is when something like this happens at a school, for example, penn state with jerry sandusky, there is accountability. so because you have these regents overseaing them, sandusky cost the school about $120 million. what happens in a club setting or in an olympic sport setting, there is no similar civil rights cause of action. there is no way an attorney like john is going to get reimbursed for what he is doing. at a school there is coverage. which means that all of the leaders have to take care -- the insurance companies put all of these requirements on what schools have to do to make it safe. not true with the olympic movement. there is no legal accountability. i have to disagree with what mitch was saying earlier about oh, it's unrealistic to expect

the sport to do something about it. i think as soon as the sport starts doing something about it, and they have a strong code of ethics, and if somebody violates that, they go and do something about it, and it doesn't take very many coaches to get banned before the other coaches realize that there are limits to what they can do to make an athlete succeed. and it was interesting what katherine was saying it wasn't necessarily make somebody more successful to abuse them or push them in such a way that it is demeaning. >> yeah, mitch what it is about the path of these high-performance athletes that feeds into this type of abuse? this >> well, if the culture is all about win at all costs then you will have these problems pop up. i have often thought competition was overplayed and demanded at levels where athletes may be

physically capable but not psychologically capable of doing this. until kids get to middle school where they have a greater ability to tolerate losing, of course at olympic sports they don't have those age requirements, so you will see all kinds of athletes struggling greatly. and when i was saying having government earning bodies being successful, my example is youth sports. if we want to change what is happening to these athletes, we have to change the culture and not just expect it to happen at the olympic level. >> right, but the problem with the culture in olympic sports is this is so ingrained. these kind of abuses have gone on before -- these abuses have gone on so long, that the young

male athletes see how their 30 and 40 year old coaches were acting towards their peers and they have become coaches where this is tolerated, and they know there will be no repercussions if you sleep with a 14-year-old or 13-year-old, and that trickles down to all levels of swimming and u.s. olympic sport, which we have to keep in mine here, we're talking about local swim clubs all over the country where kids are swimming and being groomed by known sexual predators from the time they are seven or eight years old. >> lisa, we have the community weighing in on this . . .

of course here we're talking not just about sexual overtures but much more egregious acts. >> absolutely. a lot of these governing bodies seem to handle these issues internally, and then they do things like ultimately remove member status from these coaches. how can they do this and then not have to report these things to law enforcement? >> well, they are not mandatory reporters under the law, but i want to take a step back just for a second, and talk about sexual abuse in the broader sense, what sexual abuse is, is it an abuse of power. me as an attorney, i cannot have a romantic sexual we lay

shunship with one of my clients, physicians or clergy members, there are these rules that sports governing bodies are very, very reluctant to adopt. it took the united states olympic body to tell all of these bodies that they had to prohibit this conduct. if the 18-year-old can do it, then the 16-year-old wants to do it. so if we want to clean it up, we have got to figure out a way of getting molesting coaches -- the same way that the military has gone through this, and schools are going through it now, and in lots of other areas, it is getting abusers out of the system. >> i want to get back to you about this idea about these governing bodies operating

outside of the law. but katherine talk about this dynamic that nancy was mentioning. did you experience anything like that? >> in my particular case my coach was the head olympic coach, and so you know -- and he was the selector of the team. >> uh-huh. >> so for me, i had to -- if i wasn't doing as he wanted me to do, which i was saying no after he had raped me, and -- and continuing to, you know, say no, i wasn't selected for the world championships, or the commonwealth games -- >> and that was punishment? >> oh, absolutely it was punishment. and the only reason i went to the european championships in '83 was because another reporter was going to do something about it. and the irony of that trip was i ended up meeting the pope in

1983 and the only reason i was standing in his presence was to hide and suppress my own abuse, you know? >> uh-huh. >> and that was back in 1983. and the management and leadership and both -- anywhere -- the leadership of the united states olympic committee has not lived up to what it is supposed to do. and they really failed. they have failed their athletes. they fail the system, and unless we have a mandatory policies in place and an enforcement mechanism, not just for the 3.2 million athletes that -- you know, that's listed but for the 60 million athletes who are most at risk, then these things are going to continue to advance, and it's not just me, there will be millions of mes. and there's too me. and you mentioned something about why don't we hear these stories? >> yeah. >> because there are too many of

them. these aren't isolated incidents. and when it becomes too many, it has been normalized and sort of accepted as the cost of doing business, and there is no reason for it to be there, none whatsoever. and we need to step in and we need to change for a new generation to help them have a voice, be the athletes that they can and aspire to be without this in their way. >> nancy we're going to have to hit a break, but quickly i want to get back to this idea of how the governing bodies can act so independently and keep most of this information hidden. >> these coaches particularly the elite coaches it is very difficult to go after him. my coach was just banned for life, and they had this information for the last 25 years, and they wouldn't do anything about it. it wasn't until congress got

involved and all praises to go to george miller for really putting a spotlight on this issue, and making some of these national govern bodies like united states swimming accountable, and having them sort of clean up their act. women's sports foundation, my organization is working with the united states olympic committee to try to create a separate entity that will investigate and sanction sexually abusing coaches. so fingers crossed -- we're hoping to get that real independence that we need to be a successful one. >> how can coaches and governing bodies be held accountable without jeopardize what these young athletes have spent their entire lives trying to achieve? we're going to look at that after the break.

>> every sunday night, join us for exclusive...

♪oin us for exclusive... welcome back. we have been talking about the alarming number of allegations of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse of olympic hopefuls at the hands of their coaches. john, we have been talking about lack of accountability. i'm curious how have institutions responded to your legal actions? >> the institutions have responded by denial, blaming the

victims, by enriching their own pockets in terms of legal fees and a corrupt insurance system. if usa swimming and the olympic committee is serious about taking a step in the right direction, the usa swimming has kept a list of child molesters, and i have never seen that list. i think they should disclose the known child molesters in their midst and do something about them. but until congress intervenes, nothing will happen. >> i think that's mind numbing. it seems like such a no-brainer. >> you would think so, but as nancy said this is a world where these guys are traveling around the world together, nobody wants to lose their seat at the world's greatest country club which is what the olympic movement is, and until you have congress come in and say you

have to clean this up -- we're talking about molest children. if you have molested kids -- for example the former president of the united states speed skating molested two kids, admitted it to, in may we tried to get a resolution passed and if you have been convicted of child molestation or confessed to it, you should no long be a member of usspeed skating, and we were unsuccessful. >> unbeliefable. >> we have some community input . . . katherine, i know that your organization has an app out there that helps people report anonymous

anonymously. how important is this? >> oh, it's huge. we have a comprehensive policy and program, and our structure is what is key. so our app on top of it speaks to the millennium generation who -- you know, they walk around with smartphones, so we made it anonymous, and we have resources right there. we have the education behavior right there for the athletes to have access to, and, you know, we're -- we're speaking to the generation, and in technology the way -- with our partner, and so we speak in their language in a way for them to communicate. >> and athletes can go to your website for more information. that is all the time we have tonight. thanks to all of our guests. we'll see you ne next time. ♪