BULLIED. BODY-SHAMED. BROKEN.
In 2006, at the age of 15, Queensland gymnast Chloe Sims (now Gilliland) stunned the world by winning two gold medals – team and individual – with her electrifying routines at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games. But then, at 17, she found herself at breaking point. After two years of battling bulimia and anxiety, of being called “heavy” and “stupid” by coaches every day, “I felt it was easier to end my own life than to give in to what they wanted me to be,” says Gilliland.
Fellow Commonwealth Games gold medallist Alex Eade was only 12 when she started hearing the same sort of comments.
“I was overseas competing and I’d fallen off the bars,” she remembers. “My coach yelled at me and said it was because my bum was too heavy.” Away from her family or anyone who could comfort her, the scared little girl steeled her jaw, blinked back tears and carried on. “It’s not like I could go home and cry to my mum,” she says. “So you just kept quiet and kept going.”
Body shaming was part of Eade’s everyday existence until she left the sport in 2019, aged 21. And the abuse wasn’t limited to verbal slurs. The talented child – and then young woman – who just wanted to fly and tumble and twist for the pure joy of it, felt like she
