Lasso Safe learns safe sport cultures and unites for triumph
Vernon Sharples’ was a member of his high school track team in the 1970s. The British Gymnastics welcomed Claire Heafford onto their team nearly thirty years later and at the 2022 Nationals, Gracie Gold skated her way back into America’s heart.
Decades and sports divisions separate these athletes’ lives, but one calculable experience bonds their stories, and the athletes can be found in media or courtrooms today.
Lasso Safe uses knowledge engineering to learn safe vs. abusive cultural calculations in sport
Safe versus abusive cultures and authority figures in sport is proving to be less capricious than once thought.
For over a decade, Lasso Safe has been gathering data and uses knowledge engineering to learn commonness in both safe sporting environments and abusive ones. Today, Lasso Safe announced the development of Sports Wellness Platform. The web app is the expression of this research, promoting cultures who excel in safety, recognizing concerning ones and equipping leaders.
Case: UCLA Track and Field
Type of abuse: Indecent assault and battery
UCLA Coach Mainwaring “He just kept saying I was this amazing guy.” – Vernon Sharples
Massachusetts, grand jury, which indicted him in early 2021 on 12 counts of indecent assault and battery. Nine of the counts involve alleged acts with boys 14 or older, and three of the counts involve alleged acts with boys under 14.
Writers Mike Kessler and Mark Fainaru-Wada report there are at least 41 men who have accused Mainwaring of abusing them. “Collectively, they rendered a detailed and consistent picture of a con man so skilled that he often conducted the abuse without his victims even realizing they were used as tools of his perversion.”
They said he initiated sexual contact under the guise of mental training that focused on getting them to control and manipulate erections and testosterone levels as a means of improving athletic performance.
Lasso Safe’s Sports Wellness Platform recognizes abusive processes to scale of sporting participants and reports. Their technology unites the voices in sport and empowers all members – participants, industry leaders and legal authorities.
For example use only: Snapshot graph condensed from 100+ data points gathered per contribution and is not a complete depiction of athletes’ experiences or Lasso Safe’s research.
Case: British Gymnastics
Abuse Type: Physical abuse
“Many elite sport contexts encourage making sacrifices and accepting few limits in order to reach selection or success. In Women’s Artistic Gymnastics, this culture includes striving for perfection, which results in the athlete ‘choosing’ to train despite pain, compete when injured or sick, neglect recovery, or eat too little, practices widespread in elite Women’s Artistic Gymnastics.”
The allegations in the lawsuit include “inappropriate use of physical force by coaches against gymnasts constituting physical assault.”
“We certainly didn’t realize how wrong it was at the time. It’s taken years and years to understand and come to terms with it.”
–Becky and Ellie Downie
The Letter Before Action sites “consistent reports of coaches slapping, pushing, and using physical force to reprimand, punish, stretch, and/or ‘correct’ gymnasts during training.” — British Gymnastics allegations
Lasso Safe’s Sports Wellness Platform recognizes abusive processes to scale of sporting participants and reports. Their technology unites the voices in sport and empowers all members – participants, industry leaders and legal authorities.
For example use only: Snapshot graph condensed from 100+ data points gathered per contribution and is not a complete depiction of athletes’ experiences or Lasso Safe’s research.
Gracie Gold comments on the pressures of being a national favorite: “Definitely athletes in the spotlight — figure skaters, especially — are under pressure to fit a certain mold, and fit a certain body type,”.
The athletes indicated that they experienced negative verbal comments about their bodies, body monitoring, forced restrictions of food and water, public criticism of the body, and punishment when body-related standards were not met. Athletes discussed the effects of these experiences, which included normalization, social comparison, extreme weight control methods, negative health outcomes, performance decrements, and decreased enjoyment. These findings are interpreted to suggest that the coaches’ actions to monitor and control the athletes’ weight constitute body shaming practices and that body-related shaming should be considered a form of emotional abuse.
“We’re not supposed to see pain and vulnerability and all that, so its hard to understand,” Corey said. “We want bigger, better but at what cost?” Luke Corey, Mayo Clinic – Huffington Post
“…why are they literally coming for a 14 year old? That’s so weird. They’re just kind of creepy for that. Why are they looking at a minor’s body that way? It’s just a little weird and kind of wrong, obviously.” Aysa Liu, US Figure Skating – ABC news
Lasso Safe’s Sports Wellness Platform recognizes abusive processes to scale of sporting participants and reports. Their technology unites the voices in sport and empowers all members – participants, industry leaders and legal authorities.
For example use only: Snapshot graph condensed from 100+ data points gathered per contribution and is not a complete depiction of athletes’ experiences or Lasso Safe’s research.
Why Abuse Continues: Inadequate support for sport leaders leaves everyone vulnerable
Fueled by dreams and hosted in a culture of silence, sport participants are uniquely vulnerable to abuse. Seventy-five percent of youth athletes are verbally abused (27M are under the age of 13), 10 out of every 100 hundred youth battle eating disorders – intense coaching and body shaming are said to be the prime reason in sport, and athletes are 60% more likely to experience depression than non-athletes. Even the best leaders stumble under the challenge to protect, and are often left vulnerable themselves. Over-loaded and lacking support, leaders work to keep the pursuit of the podium alive while composing a new narrative of safety. They are under the spot light as hushed athletes from nearly every sport and country are looking to them for reformation before another athlete becomes a survivor – a narrative everyone deserves, but that which feels evasive, at best, for most.
How the Sports Wellness Platform works: Uniting all members of sport to empower safety
Sports’ greatest leaders in contrast to its biggest monsters have helped shape the Sports Wellness Platform through universal trends, conveyed by commonalities such as policy-making and onboarding, reporting and relationship building, with safety innovators including Brian Orser, Giovanni Malagò and Luke Bodensteiner versus terrors such as Larry Nassar, Richard Strauss and Kim Gyu-bong.
For this reason, over 450 safety contributors across 32 countries/territories have united through Lasso Safe, making them a balanced and open coalition of sport leaders. Together since 2010, they have created the Sports Wellness Platform as a way to empower sport culture safety through the collective voices of athletes, survivors, staff, executives, and all members of sport, as well as collect data for knowledge engineering. The Sports Wellness Platform is a roadmap and resource, navigated by sports’ people and their stories, for developing a truly high-performance culture that prospers through transparency and accountability.
The minor and youth sports industry is expected to grow in participants and revenue up to 4-5x greater than we have ever seen. The number of abuse reports are predicted to exceed this growth rate due to higher economic stakes and increased travel. The Sports Wellness Platform is scaled to today’s 40-60M sports participants as well as this projected growth and uses the mass data to evolve hand-in-hand with the industry.
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Sand Mountain’s General Manager, Patrick O’Brien, is a thought leader in sports performance and safety, leading by example from ground level to C-suite cultural health. He is among the first to adopt Lasso Safe’s Sports Wellness Platform as a means of serving his community, asserting Sand Mountain’s public commitment to advanced safety practices, accountability, and transparency. All members and guests can rest assured that their well-being is at the forefront of Sand Mountain’s ethos and is provisioned by the equipoise system inherent to Lasso Safe.
Internally managed reports can be rectified before the problem escalates, improving customers’ sense of safety, customer retention and a more positive media presence.
Assembling to save lives
Sharples, Heafford and Gold live with the residual undercurrent left by abuse, the life-long struggle felt by survivors. Scattered and alone, pains persist; but triumph happens when their voices unite. Through the Sports Wellness Platform, athletes and their stories join the leaders in sport safety, with each life saved bringing triumph to their own. In the first decade of Lasso Safe’s existence, they have become the living standard for safe sport communities. They’ve set in place the structure to help all members in sport get where they need to go. And now is the time to fully move towards the ongoing, performance-based technology they developed as Lasso Safe’s Sports Wellness Platform.
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