Speaking in court this week, Norwegian track superstar, Jakob Ingebrigtsen, who holds four world records and the Tokyo 2020 1,500m and Paris 2024 5,000m gold medals, explained why he had stopped calling his father “Dad” when he was around 11 years old.
“I no longer saw this person as a father. I thought that the things he says, the things he does and has done, are not worthy of a father,” Ingebrigtsen said. He was then asked, as a father himself, what was missing. “Empathy, caring,” he said.
[ Father of Jakob Ingebrigtsen denies physical abuse allegations as trial starts ]
The outcome of the trial of his father Gjert remains to be seen of course, but, one way or the other, the testimony serves as a broad reminder that sport in general is not always the safe place it is meant to be.
Not so long ago, tennis was the poster child for long-running family squabbles that bled out into the public domain and where the “bad dad” theme was like a variant gene that kept popping up in different generations, one the sport just couldn’t suppress.
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Damir Dokic was serially abusive from the moment his daughter Jelena hit Grand Slam tennis, collecting a string of offences off the court and which saw him banned in 2000 by the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) for six months.
Stefano Capriati was accused of treating his daughter Jennifer as a meal ticket before the then 17-year-old millionaire was charged with shoplifting a $15 ring from a mall kiosk in 1993. Jennifer Capriati later became emblematic for burnout and disfunction at superstar level.
Croatian player Mirjana Lucic won the Australian Open women’s doubles title in 1998, but later that year at the age of 16 fled to the United States with her mother and four siblings, saying life with her father Marinko was terrifying.
The behaviour of Jim Pierce, father of Australian and French Open champion Mary, was so egregious that WTA banned him in 1993 from attending tour matches and passed a regulation known as the “Jim Pierce rule”.
“Dad would slap me after I lost a match, or sometimes if I had a bad practice,” she has said.
The list goes on, but the issue touches on a theme that affects every parent who has a child involved in sport and it begs the question how parents should behave while watching, coaching and supporting their children.
A master’s degree thesis, appropriately named “Elite Athletes? Or Elite Parenting?”, conducted in Australia in 2014 indicated that a child’s performance on the football pitch (under-13) was very much a reflection of his parental support, but it added that “a parent’s dedication to their child’s talent was rarely just about the sport”.
It mentioned many things that adults today might recognise. One is that having talented children involves the parents investing a greater amount of time in supporting their activities.
Subsequently the adults willingly become more a part of their children’s sporting life and less part of the one they once belonged to. The more children they have involved in sport, the greater the investment by the parents.
Parents also find out that there is often a financial burden for their child being talented in a sport. Representation at provincial or national level requires specialist attention and sometimes equipment, extra hours required from the child to hone skills and even nutritional requirements that are outside the budgets of many households.
Studies also showed how children begin to exhibit adult behaviours, some of which are welcome such as sportsmanship, a sense of fairness and teamwork, and some that are not like cynical fouling and gamesmanship to achieve the desired outcome.
Then as children age the dynamic between child, parent and coach begins to change. The coach becomes the main influencer. And if it is a team sport, the team becomes like an extended family, at least in teams that, as a group and individually, see themselves as competitive and ambitious.
Every parent who has stood on the side of a pitch or sat in the stands has a different reason for being there. At the levels of Pierce, Capriati and Dokic, winning and losing big matches was the difference between struggle or a life of financial security.
But the motives and emotions are the same for the Grand Slam winner, Olympic gold medallist or the child who wants to win a provincial championship or an underage competition at school. Parents can fall into the same mindset and try to redeem their own broken dreams through their children.
They vicariously live their lives through their sons and daughter’s successful sporting activities.
Researchers in the Netherlands even found that parents who experience unresolved disappointment from the past do feel pride and fulfilment when they can bask in their children’s glory. Watching their child succeed helps heal emotional wounds.
Being a parent on the sideline is a huge responsibility. The trick is not to be like Steffi Graf’s dad Peter, who before he died in 2013 had verbally abused officials and served 25 months in prison for tax fraud, or Pierce, whose brutal training methods and foul-mouthed courtside behaviour became his legacy.
Elite parenting for kids in sport has a nice ring to it. But history has shown us over and over that when it comes to parents and offspring in sport, tutoring the adults in the room is often just as important as mentoring the children.
