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The Safe Sport Training

Today I want to share a personal experience about a prevention program from bullying. 


First, I have to put you in context. I am a cyclist and I have been competing for a long time all around Spain, and also I have been in some international races. Last summer, I had the opportunity to sign for a professional Canadian team to race with them. The main thing about this story is that, in order to be able to have a Canadian licence and be part of the team, I had the obligation to do the “Safe Sport Training” program. This program was created by the Coaching Association of Canada to promote physical, psychological, and social health, in line with the Universal Code of Conduct to Prevent and Address Maltreatment in Sport. This training is mandatory for all Sport Canada-funded organizations since 2020, and have to take this training everyone involved in sport including decision-makers (Senior staff, High-performance directors, Case managers, Adjudicators, Investigators, Operational board members), people with direct athlete contact (National team athletes, parents of junior athletes, Coaches, High-performance staff, National Training Centre, Nationally appointed coach developers, integrated support team personnel [mental, strength and conditioning, nutrition, physio, massages, etc.], Contractors, Officials), and people with no direct athlete contact (Organizing committee members, Administration/finance staff, Governance committee members, Judicial boards, Governance board members, Event volunteers, Office staff).


The training can be done in English or French, the official languages of Canada, and it focuses on acknowledgement, awareness and action of all the possible ways of maltreatment in sport. The 90-minute training includes videos and presentations of theoretical and practical cases of maltreatment in sport, like bullying, abuse of power, sexism or racism, explaining the concepts, how to detect them and how to act against them. It also asks some questions at the end of every topic that must be answered right in order to continue and complete the training to make sure the user has understood everything.


I believe this program is a very good example of prevention of bullying and other types of aggression in the world of sport, and I think it is a great idea to implement it to everyone involved in it, not just the athletes. This way it takes care of the environment and all the people inside the teams and competitions can detect maltreatment and take actions if needed. I have never seen anything similar in Spain and I don’t know about other countries, but I would recommend to every sport federation of any nation to implement a program like this.

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