In Russia, a top figure skating coach has been accused of physical and sexual violence against an 11-year-old athlete. The scandal has sparked a conversation about abuse in children’s sports worldwide.
Sergei Rozanov, a coach at a top figure skating academy in Russia, made headlines in the country this spring when he was accused of abusing a then-11-year-old he was training. While Rozanov has since quit the academy, he continues to work in Estonia, according to reports.
The journalist Sofia Gushina of the independent Russian outlet Veter uses the incident to shine a light on what she describes as a much larger problem of abuse in children’s sport – not just in Russia, but across the globe.
Gushina describes a closed world in which parents hand authority to coaches and where control, humiliation and injury can be normalised. The piece threads together vivid interviews with former youth athletes, examples of other public scandals, and international research to show how easily abuse can be written off as “discipline” and “pushing for results”.
One anonymous interviewee is “Nastya”, who started practising martial arts at the age of seven and eventually decided to train seriously in sambo (a Russian-origin martial arts and contact sport). Her description of the training programme is brutal. In one sparring session, a much larger boy hesitated to hit her; the coach, she recalls, instructed him to “train in beating up a woman”.
There were push-ups on asphalt covered with broken glass – Nastya remembers later picking out tiny shards from her hands – and a concussion after she was forced to attempt a move she didn’t understand. Suffering from injuries, bullied by the coach – and later by peers who followed the instructor’s lead – Nastya quit the sport. She says she is still dealing with the psychological aftermath.
Then there’s “Anna”, who got into organised hiking aged 12. Her own coach told her he was “drawn to young girls” and showed her nude photos of another woman on his phone. Anna came to see this as grooming only years later; when approached by Veter, her former coach denied overstepping boundaries.
European researchers who are cited in the article surveyed some 10,000 athletes and found 75 percent of them had encountered some form of abuse before 18. The mechanism, researchers argue, is structural: training is opaque to outsiders; “early specialisation” and the race for results heighten risk, while the child’s sense of identity becomes tied up with their sporting performance, making protest harder.
While Gushina’s report doesn’t offer any explicit answers on how this abuse might be stopped, it does show what happens when people speak – and are believed. Anna’s retrospective naming of “grooming”, Nastya’s decision to walk away, and the public scrutiny unleashed by the Rozanov allegations suggest that breaking the silence could be one way to protect children’s safety.
Original article (“Она орала, дрессировала, лупануть могла по рукам, по ногам”) by Sofia Gushina was first published in Russian on 29 June 2025.
It is available here.
Veter (“ветер”, means “wind” in Russian; its name is a reference to “the winds of change”), is an independent news site that began as a YouTube channel in 2023. It aims to present the stories of “ordinary Russians living in difficult times”.
Summary by TM
