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I. INTRODUCTION
Young Olympic hopeful Adriana Giurca is practicing her gymnastics routine at the prestigious Dinamo Club sports school in Romania, as she does most nights.1 Her coach Florin Gheorghe is in a particularly bad mood.2 He commands Adriana to perform a complicated dismount, and when she stumbles, he explodes: he slaps her, pounds her head against the balance beam, and kicks her body as she lies whimpering on the floor.3 Adriana manages to stagger to her feet and is instantly commanded to proceed to the floor mat, where she fails to perform up to her coach's standards.4 Again, she is punched and kicked, but this time Gheorghe grabs a bat and beats her helpless body with it.5 Adriana never gets up again.6 Adriana's teammates testified in court that corporal punishment was normal: "[w]e accepted the beatings and the pain because we were convinced that this would open the door to top performance for us."7 Adriana's story provides just one example of the abuse young Olympic hopefuls throughout the world suffer in sports boarding schools, at the hands of coaches who will literally kill to win gold.
The Olympic creed states: "The important thing in life is not the triumph, but the fight; the essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well."8 This noble mantra, however, is overshadowed in the twenty-first century Olympic competition, where fame, money, and job security depend on winning, not simply fighting well.9 This reality drives states and coaches to sacrifice and risk everything-including the lives of their children-to enhance their athletic performance on the global stage.10 To increase their competitive edge, countries throughout the world adopt abusive state-sponsored sports boarding school systems similar to those pioneered by the Soviet Union.11 In these recruitment systems, promising athletes as young as age three are shipped away from home to schools that focus almost exclusively on athletics, where all that matters is doing what their coach demands.12 Although the sports boarding schools may be effective at churning out top-level athletes, their competitive nature renders them a breeding ground for human rights abuses.13
The international community often hears the "glory stories" of the Olympics, yet the abusive aspect of Olympic recruitment remains largely unknown.14 This abuse receives far less international...