Panorama 2020 E40
Category
🦄
CreativityTranscript
00:00I'm Colin Jackson, former hurdler.
00:05At the height of my career, I was lucky enough to reach the top of British sport.
00:10I won an Olympic medal and was world champion.
00:14But throughout my sporting career, I was harboring a secret.
00:18An eating disorder I now believe started as anorexia, later developing into bulimia.
00:26And I'm not the only one in sport to have gone through this.
00:30The doctor sat me down and she was like, Rebecca, you are dying.
00:33Tonight on Panorama, I want to understand why so many elite athletes seem to struggle
00:38with their eating.
00:39A lot more work has to be done before ultimately I think we have a system which really does
00:45get the best out of our athletes without brutalising them.
00:48There's a lot of athletes who still aren't comfortable about speaking out.
00:51We need to address why not.
00:56To get in the mindset of an elite athlete, you've really got to understand obsession.
01:19But that same obsession to succeed can have a really dark side.
01:37To be successful in an elite sport, you have to have a tough training regime, alongside
01:43Exercise that often includes a strict diet, where food intake is carefully monitored to
01:49maximise performance.
01:51Between 1993 and the early 2000s, my drive to run faster led me to believe I needed to
01:58be lighter too.
01:59I was at the peak of my career.
02:02The only thing that I thought mattered was winning and setting world records.
02:07This intense focus on exercise and controlled eating led to damaging behaviours.
02:13At the time I was restricting myself to a dangerously small amount of food.
02:19Around a quarter of what I now know was needed to fuel my training.
02:25I really believed that I had to be as skinny as I possibly could to succeed.
02:33But actually it wasn't helping me win.
02:35It was damaging both my body and my career.
02:40And I know from personal experience that eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia
02:46are a problem across many more sports.
02:50People with anorexia try to keep their weight as low as possible by not eating enough food,
02:56exercising too much or both.
02:58People who have bulimia go through periods where they eat a lot of food in a short amount
03:03of time and then make themselves sick or use laxatives.
03:08But exercising can be a symptom too, one that is often missed.
03:14For my mum Angela and my sister Suzanne, it must have been impossible.
03:19On the one hand watching me win medals, whilst on the other I was physically fading away.
03:24At what stage did you think, what is happening to this boy?
03:28After the world championship because you said to me, when I said, look at this Colin, look
03:33at this picture, and you said, mum, I am skinny, aren't I?
03:38I remember the headline in the New York Times at the time saying that the skinny Brit has
03:42broken it.
03:43And I was like...
03:44Oh, they actually said that?
03:45Yeah.
03:46A little Brit, yeah.
03:47I ended up having that sense of, OK, if I eat too much, if I binge with food, I've got
03:52to throw up.
03:53If I've got to be...
03:54I've got to throw up.
03:55So it moved into bulimic tendencies.
03:56It moved into being bulimic tendencies.
03:58Because I was winning, because I was running faster and breaking records, the only thing
04:03I put that down to was keeping slim and weight loss.
04:09But the eating disorder didn't just impact my weight.
04:12It had other effects too.
04:14You could never sleep.
04:17I could never sleep.
04:18So you were always awake.
04:20And even though you had no energy, really no energy, you couldn't rest.
04:24It's very disturbing actually because I think young people who are doing that and they don't
04:29have the level of concern around them, I think it must be...
04:34Well, it could be life-threatening.
04:37And that's no joke.
04:43For my family, it was clearly terrifying to see the damage I was doing.
04:47For me, it was exhausting.
04:49I was in a constant battle with myself.
04:52It's something I didn't talk about with anyone.
04:56There has been very little research in this area, but the largest study to date suggests
05:01that elite athletes are far more likely than the rest of the population to develop an eating
05:06disorder.
05:0720% of female and 8% of male athletes had an eating disorder.
05:14That's two times higher in women and 16 times higher in men than the wider population.
05:24And the damage eating disorders do can be massive.
05:28It can affect the hair, teeth, skin and digestive system.
05:35The cardiovascular system can suffer too.
05:39At their worst, eating disorders like anorexia can be deadly.
05:52Growing up, Rebecca Quinlan dreamed of becoming a professional runner.
05:56As a teenager, she had already started to restrict what she ate, believing it would
06:01improve her performance in local running championships.
06:05I think there is a general culture in particularly track and field athletics that weight loss
06:12is good, weight loss will enhance your performance.
06:14I'd hide some of my breakfast, I'd try and give away my lunch or throw it away at school.
06:19Everyone around me just looked so much thinner than I felt and I just thought, well, I had
06:24a dream of becoming a professional athlete.
06:25I really wanted to run for Great Britain when I was older and I just thought, if I want
06:31to achieve my dream, I need to be thinner, I need to have the figure of an athlete.
06:36Over time, Rebecca's battle with restrictive eating and exercise escalated.
06:42I went to university to do sports science and that's where the eating disorder really
06:47started to kick in, so I started to restrict even more, I started to exercise a lot, lot
06:52more so I'd go out for extra walks and I started to find that my world was becoming increasingly
06:57dominated by food.
06:59Did nobody see you and say, come on, Rebecca, you look extremely, really painfully thin?
07:05As part of my course, I had swimming lessons every week and so I had lost a lot of weight
07:13and it would have been visible to the swimming teacher, seeing me in a swimming costume every
07:18single week, that I'd gone from virtually a normal weight to severely underweight, but
07:23nothing was ever said.
07:24Many people with an eating disorder find it difficult to acknowledge the problem and don't
07:28ask for help.
07:30The anxiety Rebecca felt over food and exercise meant that she didn't openly admit to her
07:35problem.
07:36It took an intervention from her university friends to finally make the difference.
07:40The eating disorder was very, very fixed in my head.
07:44I had gone past the point of no return really.
07:47I couldn't train anymore, I was struggling to walk, let alone run.
07:50My friends called my parents saying, look, we're really, really, really worried and my
07:56parents came to collect me and took me home.
07:59What happened from there on in?
08:00My parents were refusing to take me back to university unless I went to the doctor, so
08:04I felt like I had no choice.
08:06The doctor diagnosed Rebecca with anorexia nervosa.
08:10It's clear from shocking photos taken during her time in treatment that the condition had
08:15had an extreme impact on her body.
08:20The doctor sat me down and she was like, Rebecca, you are dying, you will die if we don't get
08:27help immediately.
08:28And she said my kidneys, liver and my heart were failing.
08:32Have you got any lasting effects from that period in time?
08:35So I have osteoporosis now, which is incurable.
08:40I still don't have a period even though I've regained the weight.
08:43Rather than helping her to success, Rebecca's eating disorder actually destroyed her career.
08:50It started out so innocently, just trying to lose weight for me to achieve my dream
08:56of becoming a professional athlete.
08:58I didn't realise that I couldn't just switch it off.
09:00I feel sad now to think that my dream got overtaken by the eating disorder.
09:08After years of treatment, she is now running in amateur races.
09:12But Rebecca will never compete professionally.
09:20These issues extend beyond athletics.
09:23Following the triumph of the British Olympic cycling teams in 2012, cycling has become
09:28massively popular, with more than 6.3 million people riding for sport or leisure in 2019,
09:35many of them young.
09:38In 2018, Jake Wright joined the Zappi race team.
09:42It's a privately run cycling team registered in the UK but training in Spain and Italy
09:48and with a reputation of getting really strong results at races across Europe.
09:54Before he joined, Jake signed a contract agreeing to live in a house with his teammates where
09:59manager and coach Flavio Zappi would provide all the food.
10:04He was sent a meal plan showing the type of things he could expect to eat, but there were
10:08almost no details on the quantities.
10:20This glitzy promotional video promises a tough regime for the team.
10:25Every morning, he'd weigh us all individually in our boxes.
10:31And then from there, he'd set you like a target weight.
10:34So I came in, in January, at like 63 kilo and he was like, right, 60 for you is your
10:42sort of number.
10:43You're quite light already.
10:44Yeah, I was already quite light.
10:47But Jake says he didn't have an issue with his weight and diet before joining the Zappi
10:52team.
10:53I paid attention to my eating because I was an athlete, I didn't obsess over it.
10:59I weighed myself probably more than your average kid, but not in a way of I need to
11:05get down to this weight.
11:06It was more in a way of tracking.
11:10After joining the team, Jake says he had concerns about the amount of food Flavio Zappi bought
11:16for members to cook for each other and take on training rides.
11:21It was very restrictive on carbohydrates and fueling in general.
11:29But no matter what the training we had, like the food would be given on a two-hour ride
11:33would be the same as what we were given on a five-hour ride.
11:36So the nutrition wasn't really geared to the training we were doing.
11:40So I'd lost weight quite fast.
11:42Flavio Zappi told Panorama that a variety of healthy and appropriate food is always
11:47available and athletes can choose how much or little to eat.
11:52But Jake says he and his fellow teammates would sometimes resort to what felt like drastic
11:58action to get more food.
12:00Any opportunity where the manager wasn't here, we'd sneak off to a supermarket and people
12:07would hide it in different places.
12:08So we wouldn't really risk having it in the house because, I wouldn't anyway, because
12:14he would look through our bags.
12:16Flavio Zappi told Panorama he wouldn't go through bags, but accepted that certain foods
12:22may be confiscated.
12:25So people will be thinking, if you belong to this team, they're not keeping you there
12:30like you're in prison.
12:32So if you felt like you were not able to do what you want to do, to eat well, etc, why
12:38did you hang around?
12:39It didn't feel like I could run away.
12:41It felt, I felt like I was trapped on the team, to be honest.
12:45It felt like if I went home, then he's cracked me then.
12:49The environment of the team was to lose weight and the advice was always to go faster, be
12:56lighter, not train more, it's always eat less.
12:59I think the environment of the team definitely encouraged me to eat that way.
13:06Flavio Zappi confirmed that he sometimes advises athletes to reduce their body fat, but added
13:12that many increase their weight during training.
13:18After 10 months, Jake left the team and sought help.
13:23His doctor diagnosed a condition normally associated with disordered eating and exercise
13:28dependency, a condition that can affect things like bone health and immunity.
13:34I got really ill because my body was on the limit.
13:37I met a dietician who wanted to do some testing to see what sort of state my body was in,
13:44so I did a scan.
13:45What did the scan entail?
13:47You'd lay down on a flat bed and a machine would pass over you and it would sort of,
13:52it could look inside you by an x-ray and separate your lean body mass to your bone tissue and
13:58your organs and stuff like that.
14:00So it could tell you what percentage body fat you've got, how strong your bones are,
14:05your bone mineral density, and that's what they wanted to look at.
14:10And it said mild risk of osteoporosis, like, now.
14:14Now?
14:15I was only 20, yeah, 19.
14:17So I was like, my bones were quite weak for my age.
14:20I realised that my body had started to shut down, really.
14:26Flavio Zappi also told Panorama that the team's nutritional plans are regularly verified by
14:31leading doctors and nutritionists involved in the sport at the highest level, and the
14:36nutrition is specifically tailored to the training.
14:40But he said that when athletes cook for themselves, they decide what and how much to eat.
14:47He added that through his years of training, he has learned that frequent weight checks
14:51can pick up over-training, under-training, flag concerning weight gain or loss, and indicate
14:58potential sickness.
15:02Rachel Morris is a former Paralympian and has competed at an elite level in both cycling
15:07and rowing, winning gold in the 2008 and 2016 Games.
15:13She was first diagnosed with anorexia when she was 18, which later developed into bulimia.
15:19When she started her Paralympic sporting career, she says she was very honest with her coaches
15:25about her difficulties with food.
15:28In the run-up to the Rio Games, training with the GB Paralympic rowing team, Rachel says
15:33she was so worried about her eating that she went to see a member of staff to ask for help.
15:39Rachel says she was shocked by the response.
15:41She says that she was told she was a nutter.
15:44The biggest thing I took out of it was that I was the weakest link in the team and I was
15:49the weakest link in the team.
15:50I was the weakest link in the team.
15:53So you're going into the biggest competition of your life in that sense, in this sport,
16:00and the pressure's on for you to win a gold medal.
16:05They understand that you're coming in with a problem, and the response you got was,
16:11you're a nutter and you're not going to make it.
16:15They understand that you're coming in with a problem, and the response you got was,
16:20you're a nutter and you're the weakest link in the team.
16:24Yeah.
16:25Those comments are not throwaway comments.
16:31British rowing denied that anybody was called a nutter and told Panorama there were no weak
16:36links on the Paralympic team.
16:38Rachel says she trained alongside other GB rowing teams where members sometimes went
16:44to great lengths to hit weight goals so they could compete.
16:48You've got the athletes who don't make their weight and so are in a room the morning before
16:54they get weighed, a hotel room, where you've got indoor rowing machines inside with a heater
17:00on and then with black bin lines over you, and that that's acceptable to sweat off that
17:05weight to be able to drop that last half kilogram, whatever it is, to be able to meet the weight
17:12for your race.
17:13To me, that's just an eating sort of factor, really.
17:17And a coach would possibly be coming to the room just to make sure that they were going
17:21to make the rows?
17:22They'd be standing around.
17:23Yeah, absolutely, they're standing there.
17:24It's part of the hotel booking.
17:27So not making that weight in that particular way, could that encourage eating disorders,
17:32you feel?
17:33I strongly believe that absolutely it can.
17:36So at your training centre there, how prevalent, in your opinion, was eating disorders?
17:43I think that there are a serious number of athletes who are either struggling with disordered
17:51eating or a specific eating disorder.
17:54So you definitely weren't on your own?
17:57No.
17:58British Rowing, Toe Panorama, they take all aspects of athletes' health and welfare very
18:04seriously.
18:05They say they believe that currently none of the athletes in their senior squads have
18:10declared or known eating disorders and cannot categorically deny the anecdote about bin
18:16liners as an athlete may have done this without informing staff or coaches.
18:22So how do you balance sporting success with the need to protect both the physical and
18:26mental health and strength of athletes?
18:29One country that believes they might just have found the answer is Norway.
18:33Since 2015, athletes representing Norway in four major sporting disciplines, including
18:39athletics, must obtain a health certificate before they're allowed to compete internationally.
18:44You can also do the weight.
18:46You can just stand on there.
18:47A doctor will measure whether an athlete's weight and height puts them in the underweight
18:51category on the body mass index scale and run a series of tests to check for things
18:56like bone density.
18:58They will only be allowed to compete if the doctors believe they are a healthy weight
19:03and do not have an eating disorder.
19:05If you clinically found that there was an eating disorder, they would just definitely
19:10be off the team.
19:11You get a red light, then you're out of the team.
19:14But it's important to understand that we take care of the athletes as well.
19:20But eating disorder is a red light.
19:24One of the groups that health advocates for the new rules is Sunedret, or Healthy Sports.
19:30Its director is Marianne Strandutneisse.
19:35Education is good, but education alone is not enough.
19:38You need a professional system to actually take care of the athletes.
19:41And you need a doctor to say, stop, if it's going wrong.
19:47They are taken good care of by their health team, and they get a treatment plan, and they
19:54have close follow-up.
19:56And the aim is to get the athletes very quickly back to normal health and to be able to train
20:02and compete as normal.
20:04We had a case recently, last year actually, with a famous Norwegian cross-country skier.
20:10And she got a red light and was out for about three weeks.
20:14And she's now back and competing and healthy enough to compete.
20:20Do you think this has an effect on the number of eating disorders here in Norway in sport?
20:26Absolutely.
20:27We've been talking to a lot of athletes themselves that tell they, if it hadn't been for the
20:34guidelines, they wouldn't have addressed their problems.
20:38So we know that this has an effect.
20:42I think the reason why Norway has come so far is because this was an expressed need
20:47from the sport itself.
20:49It was actually parents and coaches at grassroots levels that went to their federations and
20:55said, this is a problem.
20:57We need a preventive system to work with this and to deal with athletes and unhealthy sport
21:06environments when it comes to food and weight and performance.
21:12The guidelines currently only apply at an elite international level.
21:16Oh, I missed one.
21:19But there are signs that they are already having a positive effect on the next generation.
21:25It's great to focus on the athletes' health instead of the results, because I think the
21:30results will come later if we focus on the good health we have.
21:35But so far, no other country has implemented the Norwegian system into rules for their
21:40own international teams.
21:43We asked the English Institute of Sport, who provide support services to British Olympic
21:48and Paralympic sports, if they would consider adopting the Norwegian health certificate
21:54system.
21:55They told us that their individual approach to working with an athlete on a more personal
21:59basis is a more suitable approach to providing support, and said just under 1% of recent
22:06referrals under the athlete medical scheme were for eating disorders, but noted that
22:12this figure only shows part of the picture.
22:16So should British sports adopt a far tougher interventionist approach to eating disorders?
22:23Ed Warner was chair of UK Athletics from 2007 until 2017.
22:29I think it's a great idea.
22:30A lot of money goes into elite sports in Britain.
22:34A very, very small proportion of that devoted to a system of health checking of that nature,
22:43I think would be money well spent.
22:46And money might just be part of the problem.
22:49Since 1997, cash from the National Lottery Fund has revolutionised elite British sport.
22:55The money is delivered by a government organisation, UK Sport.
23:00They award funding to individual sports based mostly on how many medals they win at the
23:06Olympic and Paralympic Games, and how many medalists they develop.
23:10In the 23 years since they were set up, Team GB has been transformed, jumping from 36th
23:18on the medal table at the 1996 Olympics to second, only behind the USA at the 2016 Rio
23:25Olympics.
23:26But the flip side of these targets is that when teams don't meet them, they are penalised.
23:33GB badminton, for example, lost all of its funding for two years in 2016 after a poor
23:39performance at the 2012 Olympics, despite a bronze medal win in Rio.
23:44Some believe that this winner-takes-all mentality may have had unintended consequences for athletes'
23:51welfare.
23:52Ed Warner has seen first-hand the impact this can have.
23:55I've seen intense pressure placed on coaches and on their athletes to get onto a funding
24:03list and then to get onto a British team.
24:06If someone says to you, you're not quite ripped enough, you're not quite conditioned enough,
24:10you're eating too much, that'll make a tenth of a second's difference in 100 metres.
24:14You might be tempted, because you want to succeed.
24:16A lot more work has to be done before, ultimately, I think we have a system which really does
24:22get the best out of our athletes without brutalising them.
24:25If you're going to have a system with limited funds, they have to be distributed somehow.
24:31I personally think there's a little too much focus on a winner-takes-all mentality, you've
24:36got to win a medal.
24:37UK Sports has to encourage the governing bodies to believe that judgements will be formed
24:42on them on something other than just medals.
24:44UK Sport is currently awaiting the findings of an independent report into a number of
24:50allegations of abuse made by gymnasts, including concerns about eating disorders within the
24:56sport.
24:57Dame Catherine Granger is chair of UK Sport.
25:01She is one of Britain's most celebrated Olympians, having won five rowing medals and has trained
25:06with Team GB's rowing team.
25:08So does she think that the pressure to achieve medals for funding is contributing to culture
25:14issues across British sport?
25:17So Catherine, many athletes will be thinking that there's absolutely no compromise, it's
25:22a winner-take-all situation, and there's no flexibility.
25:27We want medals, and that's the most important thing.
25:30Is that true?
25:31Well, you know, we're in high-performance sport.
25:34I think athletes want medals, you and I wanted medals, coaches want medals, but is that the
25:38only thing that matters?
25:39Absolutely not.
25:40You know, how those medals are won are crucial and will be looked at as much as what the
25:44medals are won.
25:45If there's an environment where it's feeling uncomfortable and it's feeling people being
25:49pushed into situations they are not comfortable to be in, they can speak out and there are
25:52places to go that they can talk about it and it will be addressed.
25:54But UK Sport's own research shows that athletes don't always believe problems will be addressed.
26:02In September this year, they released a survey showing only around half of athletes believe
26:08there are consequences to inappropriate behaviour.
26:12So surely you personally can't be happy with that, that that's how they feel?
26:15No, I wouldn't be happy with athletes not being happy with the consequences.
26:19And I think there's a big piece of work to be done on sometimes people won't know what
26:25the consequences necessarily have been, but it still means with that number of athletes
26:28not being happy about the consequences, then there's a risk that you don't have the trust
26:32in the system.
26:33How confident are you that an athlete in the environment we're in today, they're worrying
26:39about their eating disorders, they should be able to approach anybody at any particular
26:44stage?
26:45Are you confident that they can do that without being judged?
26:48I want to be working in a world of sport where any athlete can speak out at any point about
26:54any issue.
26:56Would I say we're in that place right now?
26:58I think from a lot of the stories we've heard recently, there's a lot of athletes who still
27:02aren't comfortable about speaking out.
27:04And I think what we need to do is, as difficult as it is to hear some of the really negative
27:09stories that you hear about athletes having experienced in their sporting careers, I hate
27:15that they exist, and those stories have happened, but I want to know about them.
27:19I still think the vast majority have had a very fulfilling, brilliant time, but for those
27:24ones who haven't had that opportunity, then we need to address why not.
27:28And the more we hear about the issues that are there, the more we hear the challenges,
27:31the more we hear about the blocks to having athletes having a positive experience, the
27:35more we can address them.
27:37Is there any punishment that can go to a particular sport if they don't adhere to these principles
27:43that you're talking about?
27:45If in worst case scenario, if a sport wasn't to meet the right standards that are involved
27:49in the funding agreements that we have with them all, the ultimate thing that UK Sport
27:56could do is withdraw funding from a sport.
27:59It's very rarely used, but I think one of the biggest things is to work in partnership
28:05with the sport.
28:06In the face of criticism of its funding model, UK Sport has said that after the Tokyo Olympics,
28:13it will change how it awards cash to individual sports, saying that success won't just be
28:18based on their medal performance.
28:21I think what you see increasingly is not just that the performance is still key, it's still
28:27about really wanting to see inspirational moments through Olympic and Paralympic success.
28:31That will always be the heart of what we try and invest in.
28:34We want to get to the place where every athlete comes into the high-performing system, however
28:39long they can stay in it for.
28:41They might achieve every dream they've ever wanted to, they might not.
28:44We can't all achieve everything we hope for, that's the sad truth, but they still leave
28:48at the end of however many years they've managed to stay in it, saying, do you know what, I'm
28:52better for being in that time.
28:56I realise how lucky I am, that I am now well.
28:59For too long, it feels like British sport has turned a blind eye to eating disorders,
29:05and with a recent medal success, it's easy to see why.
29:09Next year, hopefully, there will be an Olympic Games in some shape or form.
29:14In the meantime, Britain's sporting authorities have an opportunity to really face up to eating
29:20disorders and take action.
29:26For details of organisations which offer advice and support with eating disorders,
29:33go online to bbc.co.uk actionline.