3 years is a long hiatus, but as the old saying goes: there's no time like the present...
In May and June of 2020, a lengthy series of worldwide protests broke out against racial discrimination and police brutality towards the black community, in response to the death of American citizen George Floyd at the hands of white police officers. The waves of the debate reverberated profoundly here in Australia, where there has been a significant history of oppression towards first nation and migrant black Australians. For those readers unfamiliar with Australia's history, this deep pain ranges from colonialism's slavery and forced family separations to constitutional and ongoing socioeconomic inequality, and racial attacks both online and in communities. The 'Black Lives Matter' support movement has gathered in strength, urgency and amplification of its important messages.
In light of this increasing movement, many organisations around the world have expressed their solidarity with those protesting, and asserted a greater commitment to diversity within their structures and the wellbeing of POC (person/s of colour). A number of athletes, musicians and other public figures have been stepping forward to share their experiences with racial remarks, stereotypes and unequal treatment. Some were exasperating, some were genuinely life-threatening; some had been very recent, some were childhood incidents, all were shocking - but not altogether surprising - to learn, as the world has such a long way to go in its striving for peace and fairness.
One such individual making his voice heard is Kent Pieterse.
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| Image courtesy of Spotify |
Kent was a member of the Australian men's artistic gymnastics national team for several years, and represented the country at numerous international competitions during his career, most notably the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. I've followed Kent on social media for a while as I greatly enjoyed his performances on the competition floor here in Melbourne. Now retired from the sport but still coaching, Kent recently posted a series of tweets where he recounted some racially discriminatory remarks made by a senior coach while he was training and the lack of support received from team-mates. I reached out to Kent asking if he would be comfortable elaborating on these experiences, as I felt that as a white person with European heritage it is important at such a critical time in our history to elevate the voices of the marginalised, to listen and to learn.
As a sport, artistic gymnastics has undoubtedly been shaped by a white-centric gaze and white European techniques. In 2020 the very notion of 'artistry' itself, in a field governed by an open-ended scoring code, is being continuously disassembled and debated by enthusiasts while Simone Biles, Gabby Douglas, Morgan Hurd, Christopher Remkes, Courtney Tulloch, and a multitude of non-white gymnasts continue to push the boundaries of what is possible on every apparatus.
I am extremely thankful to Kent for his time and his honesty in responding to my questions.
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"I think John Orozco and I have quite similar stories in the sense that we struggled to find where we fit in, but we were both two black guys who wanted to do the best we could for our country but we were made to feel different because of how we looked..."
Hi Kent. Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions.
First and foremost, where can we find you these days during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown period? What activities have you been up to? I see music is still one of your big passions!
That’s a fantastic question!
As far as work goes, I’ve been fortunate enough to still coach gymnastics classes over Zoom live calls, as well as having an online LMS (Learning Monitoring System) which my club had put in place during the shutdown to help kids continuously keep up with and practice their skills and activities at home.
You are also very correct about the music! Just before COVID-19 made everything go into complete shut down, I managed to finish set up and make my studio in the back of my house (bless my amazing fiancée for being super patient and supportive of it!) I’m currently working on my first full-length album which has been something I put on hold for quite some time as I wanted to focus all of my attention to my last year of gymnastics in 2018 and to do more producing and song writing during 2019. I’m hoping to have it completed and released sometime this year or latest early 2021.
So to give people a bit of background to you in case they didn't know already, you were born in Durban in South Africa. At what age did you come to Australia and what was that transition like?
I moved to Melbourne on the 1st July 2005 with my parents and two siblings (older brother and younger sister), it was solely based on the fact that my parents had both been here and really liked the place. My mother also had family that lived in Perth and Melbourne, so we decided on Melbourne over Perth. I was 11 at the time and as you can imagine, it was already halfway through the school year which made it difficult for me to get a gauge on what the level the education was like (when I was in primary school here in Australia, the year 5 and 6 students were in the same class split up into different colour rooms). I was also starting to go through the early stages of puberty which made for a lot of emotional days missing the rest of my family and friends back in South Africa.
To be honest, it took the rest of that year to transition into familiarising myself with the Australian culture and customs as well as the way things are done (or perceived) to most Australians about the rest of the world. As most people know, a lot of South Africans moved to Australia at the end of the apartheid to start new lives, but I was very surprised that most of my class members genuinely didn’t know about South Africa or thought I lived in a hut and had a lion as a pet. I also had a bit of fun with this and actually went along sometimes before saying “No, I lived in a house just like the one you live in.”
You had already started gymnastics back in Durban. What was starting in gymnastics here in Australia like for you? What kind of barriers did you find yourself navigating? What things came to you easier than others?
I
was very lucky to be given a chance to do the entrance test for the then
Victorian Men’s Gymnastics High Performance Centre (HPC for short), three days
after arriving in the country. I arrived on the Friday night around 11pm and
was up and ready to check the gym out by 8:30 the next morning! I remember
walking through the entrance and seeing predominantly white male gymnasts with
the exception of 3 male gymnasts who were of colour (two were Asian and one was
mixed race/biracial). I knew this was going to be tricky in itself, as I didn’t
have someone who could relate to where I came from and the hardships that were
still happening within South Africa (the country of South Africa we know today
only came about in 1994 after the abolishment of apartheid, so
realistically it’s only a 26-year-old country where everyone was now treated as
equals). I think it took a good two weeks until I was comfortable enough to start
talking and say hi to my team mates when making my way to my locker or swapping
between the apparatus we were training on.
I
think having the self-motivation and drive to push myself without being asked
what to do came easier to me than to some of my team mates. From a young age I
was taught that if you want something, you need to be willing to work hard for
it and not give up. This helped me through some really tough times and taught
me to also show my character and my worth through my actions, more than just
talking about it and nothing ever eventuates out of it. I also took pride in
being a gymnast and not just venturing off and doing a sport like athletics,
soccer or rugby which I could have excelled at. They just never felt
challenging enough for me and never gave me fulfilment like gymnastics did.
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| Image by Russell Cheyne/Reuters/Globe and Mail 2014 |
Throughout
your gym career you really flourished on vault and on floor, can you talk a
little about any experiences you had dealing with people's perceptions or
expectations of black athletes, in terms of beliefs around athletic power
and/or speed? Was there an expectation or an ideal that you felt that you had
to live up to in the gym on your specialty events, and how did that affect how
you trained or felt about yourself?
Initially
in the early years as I started making national squads and teams to compete at
international meets, there was definitely a couple of times where I’d get the
occasional “But you’re black, you have so much power!” or, “This should be easy for you with the leg
strength you have.” I remember during a junior training camp at the AIS in 2009
or 2010, a few of us were having lunch and I said “I always worry each time I
do vault that if I don’t quite land properly, my left kneecap will break or
snap again”. (This was due to me originally splitting and re-breaking my left
kneecap back in 2006 and again in 2008.) One of my team mates said without
hesitation, “Look at the size of your legs compared to mine, must be all that
black power. You’ll be fine.” My response was, “but I’m human, just like you…”
I think as time went on I learnt that I can be a major factor for our team
results on floor and vault at a state and international level, as I had a very
clean and consistent Tsukahara 3/2 twist on vault and at least 3 different
floor routines varying in difficulty depending on what the situation was, and if
I needed to hit a clean set or bump up difficulty to catch another team. It was
tougher for me during my time as a specialist as I knew I would struggle to
find the difficulty on rings being more on the taller side of the gymnastics
world. I knew that if I could work on being more of a backup and focusing on
execution, I could also be a reliable choice for a solid consistent score.
Funny enough out of all the events my favourite was high bar, so even though
I’m known for my tumbling and vaulting, I’d always look forward to smashing out
a high bar routine and at some points in my career, it was my highest start
score of the 4 events that I did as a senior.
Right
now it feels like we are at a real 'turning point', with the Black Lives Matter
protests against police brutality and systemic racism in the US spreading wider
than ever, and starting to bring about major cultural reflection and change.
What have been some of your thoughts on seeing this activism and solidarity in
action?
I
think over the last few weeks that the Black Lives Matter protests have been
happening, it’s really shown me just how little I know about the indigenous and
Torres Strait people of our country. I’ve been talking to a lot of my
Indigenous and Torres Strait friends about their stories, their culture and
their ancestors and heritage. I think it’s fantastic that we acknowledge the
lands of the tribes that lived on them, but as far as educating and informing
our youth, young adults and even our older generations about this amazing
history of the first people of Australia, unfortunately we are not doing nowhere
near enough! I think I only learnt about the ANZAC’s in high school from year 7
all the way through to year 12 during history and I understand its importance,
but we also need to discuss the other heavier things like “The stolen
generation” and how “Australia Day” is actually “Invasion Day”.
What conversations or changes do you hope it will spark here in Australia?
As
a person who has been an Australian citizen for over 13 years now, we shouldn’t
only accept and acknowledge the good things about our country, we also need to
accept and acknowledge the bad so that we can better ourselves and our people.
Also, it’s 2020! Why do black people in the USA still have to fight to be
treated equally or fear that it could be their last day alive when driving or
walking down the street because they fit the description of a person who robbed
someone or one of the most common excuses being “You look/looked threatening?! We
are all human beings at the end of the day, period.
As they kept going on it changed from feeling beyond pissed to unappreciated, worthless and quite frankly, “What’s the point of continuing when I’m never going to be good enough in your eyes?”
You
recently wrote some tweets sharing specific past experiences you had in the gym
where you felt your identity was singled out. You mentioned one incident where
a senior coach used a racially derogatory choice of words to describe the way
that you were standing on the floor mat. How did you react to that at the time, and looking back now would you
have reacted any differently?
I
remember initially feeling "beyond pissed", as this was a person who I thought
had my best interests and wanted to see me succeed and excel in our sport. As
they kept going on it changed from feeling beyond pissed to unappreciated,
worthless and quite frankly “what’s the point of continuing when I’m never
going to be good enough in your eyes?”
Did it change your relationship with that coach or the way that you viewed them?
My relationship and the way I viewed
that coach definitely changed after that conversation.
You
also talked about other coaches and teammates not really understanding, or
dismissing it, when you raised the incident. What would you have liked to hear
at the time?
I
think this hurt even more to be honest. Knowing that some of my team mates and
coaches who I spent more time with than my own parents, siblings and friends
just said “ignore them” or “GET OVER IT”. I can’t tell you how many times I
heard those three words when trying to explain the importance of calling
someone out for being out of line and disrespectful to others but also when a
racist comment, a snarky comment about someone’s “manliness” or a homophobic
comment was thrown around with no consequences or repercussions at all. I felt
that they would never step up and help when I needed it the most and that’s not
just on the competition floor and at training, but just in life.
What is some advice you would give to coaches or to teammates that have a gymnast raise an issue like this with them?
My
advice to coaches and my former team mates is, listen to your athletes and you
team mates, if they’re going through something and are asking you for help, be
there! It seems like a mighty big thing to do but if someone knows that you are
invested in them, I guarantee that it will be returned later on down the track.
To sum it up “treat people the way you want to be treated”.
You also claimed you were told by this same senior coach,
"You're nothing special, you're lucky you are even on the squad". How
was this different to the kind of feedback given to other members of the
national squad?
I
remember many incidents where a few of my team mates weren’t having the best
day and the coach would say “It’s alright, you will get it next time” or “Don’t
be so hard on yourself” whereas for myself and a few of my other team mates
there was always an urgency to nit-pick all the small things we did wrong. I
can promise you this, there was even a time where you would go into a trial for
a competition and at the start of the week you could pre-determine who was
going to be on the team. As long as they never injure themselves during that
time, you knew they would be going to that international meet.Was the person called out for saying these things?
There were a
couple of times when this coach was called out for the feedback they gave, but
as far as what they said to me, I don’t think any discussion or being called
out on it occurred.
[E]very time Prashanth and Chris go out there and represent our country, there is potentially a POC child watching them and saying “I want to be like him and do what he can do!” I say this because that’s what Prashanth was for me.
Have
any other ex- or current Australian gymnasts expressed to you that they have
had similar experiences, and feel supported by your speaking out?
Yes,
they have. I think a lot of them just like me, didn’t know when was the right
time to speak out or say something about what was happening behind the scenes.
I guess it was this big play of “Hey everyone! We’re one great big family!” but
in reality, it was more “I’m going to stand here next to you and put on a fake
smile, even though you treat me like absolute s**t when these people or no one
is around.” You’d be surprised how many amazing and talented gymnasts left the
sport because of this and how many to this day, still feel the effects of those
moments that they had to endure, simply because no one knew.
Many of Australia's MAG international
medals and rankings over the years have been thanks to gymnasts who came from
non-white, non-European backgrounds, including Prashanth Sellathurai, Naoya Tsukahara and Chris
Remkes. Can you talk about what it means as an athlete to see diverse
representation within lineups?
It's
so important! You have to remember that every time Prashanth and Chris go out
there and represent our country, there is potentially a POC child watching them
and saying “I want to be like him and do what he can do!” I say this because
that’s what Prashanth was for me as a junior gymnast and I know that’s what
Chris is for many junior and young gymnasts of today.
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Kent (back left) and Naoya Tsukahara (foreground) and Australian team, 2014
Image courtesy Instagram |
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Prashanth Sellathurai (second left) and Australian team, 2010
Image courtesy ABC.net.au |
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Christopher Remkes (far right) and Australian team, 2018
Image courtesy Zimbio |
Diversity helps us to
break the cycle and the mould of stereotypes!
Imagine if we said this to every
person of the same race: “Oh, you’re Black so that must mean you play basketball and
want to go to the NBA.” or, “Oh, you’re Asian so that must mean you play table
tennis and want to go to the Olympics.” Firstly, that’s stereotyping and
low-key racism at its finest and secondly: is that all you know those races
for?! It’s like every time I (and I’m sure many other people of these races) have
to say back “You do know that we’re not all just really good at one thing,
right?”
I think it’s important for people to see diversity as a normal thing
and shouldn’t be surprised if a team is made up of all races and not a
predominant one.
As an Australian gymnast with South
African heritage, what did it mean to you to compete at a Commonwealth Games
(in 2014)?
Everything! Being on that competition floor I
knew I wasn’t just representing my country, I was representing my birth country
and heritage for both Australia and South Africa! To be able to say I went to
the Commonwealth Games and almost came home with a bronze medal on vault
against some of the world’s best vaulters… To even be mentioned in the same
sentence as them was insane to me! The craziest part was I originally wasn’t
even named on the team! For all my family, friends and all their friends back
home in South Africa and Australia, it gave them hope to keep working towards
their goals because if I could make it and achieve one of the goals I had set
out for myself, so could they. It gave me and everyone around me hope, hope to
keep working towards where you want to go.
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| Image Courtesy BBC Sports Scotland 2014 |
A
lot of athletes and public figures lately have been sharing their stories
within the Black Lives Matter hashtag on social media. Are there any that have
really resonated with you, and why?
I
think John Orozco and I have quite similar stories in the sense that we
struggled to find where we fit in, but we were both two black guys who wanted
to do the best we could for our country but we were made to feel different
because of how we looked. Obviously, his story differs in some areas but I can
also relate to not feeling welcomed by my own heritage (being mixed
race/bi-racial and not knowing my Dutch and Belgium heritage). All in all, I
really did resonate most with his story.
What are some actions you think Gymnastics Australia as an organisation could
take (or should take) to meaningfully address racial inequality within
gymsports in Australia, and show commitment to supporting the wellbeing of POC?
I
think having more representation and events revolving around and celebrating
how diverse our country is and how diversity is what makes Australia great!
It
would be awesome to have more workshops or talks that involve our past POC
gymnasts and them talking about their experiences inside and outside the gym
and how it shaped them into the person they are today, as well as using local
businesses within the POC community to collaborate with to get more people
excited about how inclusive gymnastics is.
Finally, is there anything else that you would like to add?
I
just wanted to say thank you to everyone who supported me through my 13 years
as an Australian gymnast and for those who continue to support me during my
coaching and educational career. Gymnastics has given me so much and even
though not all of it was good, you learn to take the good and the bad, it’s the
same with life.
I wish all my team mates and anyone associated with gymnastics
in Australia the best both past, present and future and I hope we can all catch
up and have great times and memories together.
A big thanks to you Meredith for
reaching out and also, I want people to go out and see the world (whenever
we’re allowed to do that again) and experience it for themselves, don’t have a
bias/swayed image or depiction about a place beforehand. Go and meet the
people, hear their stories, enrich yourself with their culture, heritage,
cuisine and places that they are proud of!
And finally: “Just be a good person”. Uplift people, show love, empathy,
encouragement, positivity and most importantly support.
If
people want to know more about my story and the ways that I am helping out the
POC community and our gymnasts currently in Victoria, please feel free to email
me at kentpieterse1@gmail.com or on Twitter and
Instagram @kentpieterse. I’m always happy to catch up over a cup of coffee or
tea and see where I can possibly help.
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