Disclosure of Ioulietta Boukouvala may strengthen other women

The letter that Greek judoka Ioulietta Boukouvala sent to the Greek Ministry of Sports is shocking and will have severe measures in sports, in judo and for the people involved. The story of the double Olympic athlete for Greece was big in the Greek media and more will be announced in the next days.

The IJF is aware of the situation in Greece and suspended the first people involved. Boukouvala who won bronze at the 2010 World Championships in Tokyo and who is a European silver medallist in 2012 spoke about the psychological and physical abuse of her during her athlete career. You will find the painful letter Boukouvala sent to the Minister of sports. “I was beaten and threatened as many times as I tried to talk”

The courage of Boukouvala should also trigger other women to speak out about circumstances that cannot stand the light of judo and any other sport.

Mr. Avgenakis,

My name is Julietta Boukouvala, this is the second time I am sending you an email. I got the courage to talk to you because there is the support of athletes in the news.

I have stopped the championship, but the mental problems that my course left in this field are not gone and at the moment I am writing to you, I am giving a fight so as not to lose my hand from an injury that has come from the hardships that I went through the championship.

I come from Ioannina and when I was little my dream was to become an Olympian, I was a talent, a child who had physical and mental strength more than other children and so my mother at 15 decided to send me to Athens to do my dream come true. We were not a rich family, so we had to find somewhere to live and eat, so the Panhellenic General Assembly took me to its facilities. When my mother took me to Athens to let me (alone) make my dream come true, she told me the following: my child, you see from there Omonia, there are the drugs, the women who are released and the whole underworld and from here is your dream, you choose where you want to go.

And this is how my story begins (because my mom never learned that when she showed me the streets of life she had to tell me that in the championship everything happens in Omonia as well). Well, because in 2004 the Olympics would be held in Greece, the then federation, after changing management, decided to hire coaches to promote athletes, coaches who in the process I learned that their training licenses are a simple paper which I do not know if the they even studied whether they gave it to them by hand or by order at home.

These coaches, therefore, due to the fact that they did not have Greek citizenship, it was easy for them to bring athletes and make them Greeks in order to fight for Greece (for a fee, of course).

Thus a very strong team was created by all of them, but without including almost any of the athletes who were born in this country, fought, suffered, dreamed, etc.

Of course, from what you understand, they created a climate of envy and opposition, and this is because when one athlete was with them, he had everything, while the others did not even exist. I will give you an example to understand what I mean:

When Ilias Iliadis came to Greece, they knew that he would become what he is, they knew that he was talented and he had everything, he had a team around him of doctors, physiotherapists and the whole federation above him, the then coach took me left in Slovenia alone, to sleep on the floor to have no coach, doctor, nothing.

It was there that I broke my ears for the first time and I had to pull the liquid with a syringe putting a towel in my mouth so as not to scream and putting cologne after instead of alcohol and this happened every day and of course the conditions we lived in were simply inhuman…

In another country we went to, I got shingles in my mouth from a dirty cutlery, it reached a little close to my heart, until we returned to Greece I was put in salt water so that it would not be infected (oh my God, what pain, what torture), we returned to Greece and sat in the hospital 1 month and the doctor told me that he has never seen such a thing.

When we returned from the preparation before the 2004 Olympics, coach X's team told me that there is a contract that has some conditions and if I sign it I will join the team with the favored ones. I never signed it because what I was told was written in it is contrary to the ideas I had and so I was blacklisted along with another athlete who also did not sign. From there on, everyone was against me, none of the staff of coach X was ordered to speak to me and not to help me in anything. The athletes were instructed not to talk to me and when I was injured I had to find the solution alone or even for my weight.

They did not let me change my weight class, they told me that if I changed my weight they would not take me to the races, they would put some people, who of course did not have doctor's papers, to tell me that I should only drink condition instead of water I eat a slice of toast with caviar for the whole day, and I did it because I just wanted the medal.

They destroyed my internal organs, I got an ulcer and I reached the limits of anorexia, and they laughed with me and told me that I am nothing and if I do not go with them I will never get a medal. But I got and managed to do a lot having a coach with me who only insulted me and I had to tolerate him having awful behavior as a coach.

He put his personal life above all, he used to go to us for preparations in places where even the prisoners do not live and he lived elsewhere and he was always with his relatives because he chose to go for preparations in countries where he comes from, he salivated in front of our eyes with female athletes and got to the point inside the plane of having sexual intercourse under the blanket with a fellow passenger.

The other coach, because I saw some things that were happening from an administrative point of view and I said them, put athletes who had not yet become Greeks to rot me in the wood during training and tell me that we would kill you.

All these years have become many which I do not know how many hours I have to write to describe them.

In the last Olympics in 2012, after a lot of struggle and with a temporary administration that entered the federation, I managed to do the impossible.

They asked me what I wanted them to do for me and I told them to change coach.

And we did it for a while, but because after the interim administration left and the team of the gentleman I mentioned to you, coach X, came back, a war started between me and my coach, who fortunately could not change him, against them (at least I had for once someone to support me), they did not want us, they did not even want me to go to the Olympics and so my coach (the new coach after the interim administration) addressed the world federation where he supported me with my preparation.

At the airport, leaving for London, they called me and told me that my fight was over and they would never let me get a medal because I am just Greek as a male voice with fluent Greek told me on the phone.

I reacted at the wrong time and moment because I am just a human being and I said where are the Greeks to support me, and then came the gratuitous shot. I pressured the team of all of them and they destroyed me, kicked me out of the sport, threatened to withdraw the lawsuit where I had filed, beat me to the point of going to the hospital, broke my car, took out a gun, threatened my mother where she was in the last stage of cancer, and many more.”

In many other couuntries letters were sent to the Ministries of Sport to take action and address zero tolerance in sexism.

#zerotolerance

Meanwhile also another Greek athlete Dimitra Androutsou suported Boukouvala with new stories.