Sport's eating disorder crisis: The time is now to treat elite athletes like human beings

An athlete’s health is worth its weight in gold. An athlete’s worth isn’t just weight and gold.

The facts don’t lie: athletes are more likely than the general populace to suffer with an eating disorder.

But in an industry revolving around the cold, hard, impersonal statistics of medal totals, goal tallies, kilograms lifted, distance covered and punches thrown, are the fundamentally human struggles of mental health problems such as eating disorders forgotten along the way?

Beat, the UK’s leading charity supporting those affected by eating disorders, makes things crystal-clear with its Director of External Affairs, Tom Quinn, explaining: “Male and female athletes are at a higher risk of developing an eating disorder in comparison to non-athletes, which is why safeguarding professionals in the sporting industry is so important.

“Concerningly, some UK sports have practices that could negatively impact people with or vulnerable to eating disorders. For instance, compulsory daily weigh-ins can motivate athletes who are currently unwell to engage in harmful behaviours to reach a target weight, such as overexercising or restricting their food intake.”

To think that eating disorders, a title under which anorexia nervosa – previously found to have the highest mortality rate of any mental disorder – falls, can prove such an omnipresent risk in sport and yet be simultaneously so woefully misunderstood in the industry is alarming beyond belief.

The topic so often seems cloistered away in quiet corners of sporting discourse, either occasionally wheeled out into the spotlight as tokenism or legitimately, genuinely highlighted by those to whom it means so much in brave efforts not given the attention they deserve.

It shouldn’t be that