Safeguarding

What safeguarding means

Safeguarding is the set of measures taken to protect athletes from abuse, harassment and exploitation. The IOC's definition of the goal is short: safe sport is "an athletic environment that is respectful, equitable and free from all forms of non-accidental violence to athletes."^[1]

There are three IOC consensus statements, not one, and the distinction matters because the field moved:

• 2007 — the first, on sexual harassment and abuse.
• 2016 — expanded the scope to physical abuse, psychological abuse, neglect and hazing, and introduced the definition of safe sport.
• 2024 — the current statement, on interpersonal violence and safeguarding, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine on 25 November 2024. Built on a review retrieving over 24,000 citations in nine languages, it introduces a socioecological model and widens the focus to ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ people, women, children and people with disabilities.^[1] [2]

The 2016 statement names four primary types — psychological, sexual and physical harassment and abuse, and neglect — and identifies psychological abuse as "a conduit to other forms," on the reasoning that "there is no sexual or physical harassment or abuse that does not also have psychological underpinnings." It defines related terms separately, and draws a distinction usually collapsed: neglect is the failure to meet an athlete's physical and emotional needs; negligence is acts of omission regarding safety, such as depriving an athlete of food or drink, insufficient rest, or an unsafe training environment.^[2]

There is no international safeguarding body

This is the single most useful thing to know, and it is routinely got wrong. As of August 2026 no independent international safeguarding entity exists.

What exists is a set of IOC-convened structures at various stages of construction: a Safe Sport Unit established in 2022; a Safe Sport Action Plan, Safeguarding Toolkit and Games-Time Framework published in 2023; an International Safe Sport Task Force approved in October 2023; a Regional Hub Initiative running feasibility studies in the Pacific Islands, Southern Africa and Europe; and an International Safe Sport Framework still in consultation. These are feasibility studies and drafts, not operating institutions. The chair of the steering committee has described it, accurately, as "not a sprint — it's a sustained journey."^[3] [4]

Games-time safeguarding has been implemented at every Olympic and Youth Olympic Games since 2016, and at Paris 2024 the IOC deployed a network of over 150 athlete welfare officers. But the standing reporting route for an athlete remains their own international federation.^[3]

The national models

The United States has the only body with statutory teeth. The Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act of 2017, signed on 14 February 2018, designated the US Center for SafeSport as the official safe sport organisation for all Olympic, Paralympic, Pan American and Para Pan American sport in the country. Its Code is explicit about the conflict it exists to remove: national governing bodies and the Olympic committee "are prohibited from interfering in, attempting to interfere in, influencing, or attempting to influence the outcome of the Center's investigations," by statute.^[5] [6]

The Center holds exclusive jurisdiction over sexual misconduct, child abuse, and criminal charges involving either — meaning the sport body must refer rather than investigate — and discretionary jurisdiction over emotional and physical misconduct, stalking, bullying, hazing and harassment. It maintains a public disciplinary database of individuals restricted from participation. It emerged, in its own words, "in response to high profile cases of sexual abuse of minor athletes within Olympic and Paralympic sport in the mid-2010s" — chiefly the prosecution of Larry Nassar, who pleaded guilty to federal charges in July 2017 and was sentenced to 60 years, followed by state sentences of 40 to 175 years and 40 to 125 years, running consecutively.^[6] [7]

The Center has also drawn scrutiny. In February 2025 the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee opened an inquiry into its vetting and hiring after an investigator it had employed was arrested on sex-crime charges, saying the accusations "seriously call into question the quality of SafeSport's vetting processes of its own officials."^[8]

The United Kingdom's model is advisory. The NSPCC Child Protection in Sport Unit, founded in 2001 and now operating as NSPCC Sport, sets the national safeguarding standards for sport and trains the sector — but states its own limit plainly: "We don't investigate or review cases and we do not have any regulatory power over clubs or sport governing bodies." Its most concrete achievement is legislative: until 28 June 2022 a sports coach in a position of power over a 16- or 17-year-old was outside the "position of trust" offence that already covered teachers. The NSPCC campaigned to close that gap, and it closed.^[9]

Two reviews that changed what federations are asked

The Whyte Review, published in June 2022 after more than 400 submissions, examined British Gymnastics. Its findings are frequently misreported, so they are worth stating precisely:

• Over 40% of submissions described physically abusive behaviour, primarily during training — including "overstretching to the point of distress as a form of flexibility management and withholding food, water and access to the toilet." The review found a strong correlation between those reports and long-term negative consequences.
• Over 50% reported an element of emotional abuse. The great majority of both concerned female gymnasts, and the behaviour was more prevalent at elite level.
• Sexual abuse featured in around 30 submissions — but "none of these behaviours appeared to be systemic in the sport in the way that the issues of physical and emotional abuse" were. That distinction is the one most often lost.
• The federation "now accepts that it failed to give the same consideration to emotional and physical abuse as it has to sexual abuse."
• Seventeen recommendations followed. The eighth goes to the heart of the structural problem: all welfare complaints about employed coaches must be independently investigated and determined by a wholly independent panel.^[10]

The Sheldon Report, published in March 2021, reviewed non-recent child sexual abuse in English football between 1970 and 2005 and found "significant institutional failings for which there is no excuse," concluding the association "acted far too slowly to introduce appropriate and sufficient child protection measures."^[11]

How federations have structured it

Athletics offers the cleanest architecture, because it separates investigation from adjudication. Under safeguarding rules approved in August 2023, the Athletics Integrity Unit investigates a safeguarding concern; an independent Case Management Group decides, serviced by an external secretariat, with power to impose interim orders and safeguarding orders restricting or suspending participation; and its decisions are appealable to a separate panel. The definitions are broad — a safeguarding concern extends to any concern, incident, suspicion, behaviour "or failure to act."^[12]

Football's FIFA Guardians programme, launched in 2019, is a framework for its 211 member associations anchored in the FIFA Statutes and Code of Ethics, and its transfer regulations impose a matching duty: a club registering a minor owes an express duty of care and an obligation to take reasonable measures to protect them from abuse. More on that.^[13]

One correction worth making, because the mistake is common. The International Tennis Integrity Agency is not a safeguarding body. Despite the word in its mission, its remit is anti-doping and anti-corruption — competition integrity, not athlete protection — and it has no safeguarding programme at all. Tennis has no equivalent of the Athletics Integrity Unit's safeguarding arm.^[14]

Adoption across the sector is now near-universal on paper. In the summer federations' 2026 governance review, 29 of 31 federations scored well on safeguarding, having shown a policy actually being implemented through training, event safeguarding officers and disciplinary cases — up from 27 two years earlier. Three had a policy but limited activity, and one still had no formal policy at all. Confidential reporting mechanisms with demonstrated action rose from 15 federations to 24.^[15]

The structural problem

Every safeguarding failure in the record shares a shape: the complaint went to the organisation that employed the person complained about. The evidence for this is not rhetorical.

• The Whyte Review's eighth recommendation exists because independent investigation did not happen, and the review found some welfare officers "lacked independence."^[10]
• The US statute forbids governing bodies from influencing the Center's investigations — a firewall exists in law because the conflict was real.^[6]
• The UK's best-known body has no investigatory or regulatory power at all.^[9]
• And the reporting rate reflects it. The Center for SafeSport's own 2024 survey of nearly 4,000 athletes found 89% of those who experienced unwanted sexual behaviour did not submit a formal complaint or report; 78% reported behaviours related to emotional harm and neglect; and 43% of those experiencing unwanted sexual behaviour said at least one instance occurred before they were 18.^[16]

Cross-border cases are the hardest. The clearest documented example ran as follows: a national federation president was banned for life and fined by the FIFA Ethics Committee in November 2020 over allegations of abuse of female players; the state courts in his own country had already cleared him for lack of evidence; the Court of Arbitration for Sport annulled the FIFA decision in February 2023, holding the standard of proof unmet and citing the dropped state proceedings; and in June 2023 the Swiss Federal Tribunal dismissed FIFA's challenge, holding that the impossibility of hearing protected witnesses by video conference does not infringe public policy — noting that no such possibility exists in law in several countries, Switzerland included. Victims in one country, a governing body in another, an arbitral tribunal in a third applying a fourth body of procedural law, and no forum in which the witnesses could safely testify.^[17] [18]

A related case shows the opposite outcome and how it was achieved: the president of the Afghanistan Football Federation was banned for life and fined CHF 1 million by FIFA in 2019 after accusations by at least five national team players, and CAS dismissed his appeal in July 2020, finding he had committed "appalling acts." The players testified from a secured location by telephone using a voice scrambler.^[19]