This post deals with descriptions of abuse, and issues related to eating disorders. It may be triggering for some readers.

One of Alex Eade's first memories of gymnastics has stuck with her like a birthmark – one she wishes she didn't have.

She was 12 years old and bright-eyed, travelling overseas for the first time on the Australian gymnastics team.

"It's a very daunting experience as it is," Alex tellsMamamia's daily news podcast, The Quicky .

"Then when I was in training, I had fallen off the bars and my coach yelled at me and said it was because my bum was too heavy," she remembers.

"There's nothing you can do about it. You can't go home and cry to your mum. You just have to suck it up and get on with your training.

"That's really difficult for a 12-year-old girl to go through."

Yes, Alex Eade has enjoyed enormous success in her gymnastics career. In 2018, she won a gold medal for Australia at the Commonwealth Games. But whilst that competition brought a career high, it also brought a new low.

"I don't think I've ever been more poorly treated than on that trip," Alex reflects. "We were trained beyond exhaustion. We were training more than 16 days in a row, which isn't okay for any professional athlete.

"They were all really heavy training days and because of the load, I suffered an injury to my achilles about two days before the competition... I felt so helpless and I just had to suffer in silence."

Alex smiled through the pain, performing her tumbles and turns whilst injured.

"After I competed, my coach said that I was a liar and that I only faked that injury to get out of some training sessions before the competition. It was just a horrible trip."

As if the physical pain wasn't brutal enough, the mental abuse in the form of body-shaming and name-calling was just as savage – if not worse.

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"We were all told that we had to lose two kilos before the competition which was just over a week away," Alex remembers. "It isn't healthy to lose that kind of weight in such a short timeframe.

"At mealtimes we were forced to eat off dessert plates and those are significantly smaller than normal plates and it was a way to portion our meals... We were basically being starved.

"We were constantly just told off and told that we would never be good enough and that we were going to embarrass our country at this competition."

At 25 years old, Alex has retired from gymnastics and she is now studying to become a doctor. But her tendency to not believe in herself – a mindset she developed from gymnastics – has stayed with her.

"I am still a very negative person and I really struggle with believing in myself. I think that that's something that I did bring from my gymnastics career. I struggle to see the positives."

Alex's story is one of the countless experiences of young girls, just like her, who have fallen victim to the world of gymnastics.

In fact, in 1995 an inquiry was launched into allegations of abuse in gymnastics at the Australian Institute of Sport. It was reported that a coach had hit a 10-year-old and that two other kids, of a similar age, had been called "fat" and "lazy". The inquiry concluded there wasn't any systemic or widespread abuse in Australia.

Then, in 2018, another inquiry found no wrongdoing. But the allegations and anecdotes of abuse persisted.

This pattern of mistreatment was brought to light in the Netflix documentary Athlete A ,which focused on the investigation and subsequent conviction of Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics team doctor accused of sexually abusing 500 young girls and women.

Watch: Documentary Athlete A on Netflix follows the story of Larry Nassar. Post continues below.

The documentary brought to light the sport's toxic culture and encouraged Australia's own gymnastics community to voice their experiences too.

Olivia Vivian, an Australian gymnast who competed at the 2008 Olympics and won silver at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, shared to Instagram that watching the documentary resurfaced memories that she had kept suppressed for years.

Olivia, who is now a competitor on Channel Nine'sAustralian Ninja Warrior,tellsMamamia's The Quicky: "I feel like I have forgotten a lot of the really hard times and I think that's a result of it just being so normalised. I remember being yelled at all the time.

"It felt like Gymnastics Australia only cared about what you could do for the country at that time, no matter what the cost was down the line... I've had all sorts of injuries and a lot of them were because of over-training."

Hopefully, though, things for the gymnastics industry are about to change in Australia.

In July 2020, at least 20 Australian g