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Jordan Chiles has opened up about the aftermath of the way one of her gymnastics coaches treated her.
The Team USA Olympic gymnast reveals in her memoir I’m That Girl: Living the Power of My Dreams, coming out on March 4, that she struggled with her mental health and her relationship with food which stemmed from one coach she worked with toward the start of her career given the nickname “Coach X” in the book.
Chiles revealed in an interview with People that Coach X would verbally abuse her, making comments about her race, calling her “fat,” and her skills while training. At the time, her coach was also an alcoholic which Chiles said made the abuse worse.
“I wanted to get it off my chest. I wanted to let people know that I had really, really down times. I’ve been in the dark, I’ve been in the deepest part of the ocean,” she said about why she wrote about her suicidal thoughts. “[Writing about] it was hard at first. But I’m happy that I was able to revisit those things and I’m happy now that people get to read it and understand, and hopefully that gives them the confidence to be like, ‘You know what? Maybe I need to talk about something [too].’”
Despite never being formally diagnosed with an eating disorder, Chiles said that she developed an unhealthy pattern of not eating to meet Coach X’s standards and would then binge eat.
“It took me a while to really find the love of food,” she said. “Now, I’ve started putting myself in that mindset of understanding that it’s OK to give yourself a cheat meal. This was a trauma, and I’m happy that I’m moving past it. I know that it’s healthy to eat and it’s healthy for my body.”
The gymnast then switched gyms, following the advice of her teammate Simone Biles, and went to World Championships Centre in Texas to train with coaches Cecile and Laurent Landi.
“They are the most amazing coaches. It’s hard to explain how they changed me. I don’t think I knew about [this kind of] support that you can get in a sport. They’re like second parents to me,” Chiles said about Cecile and Laurent.
“They understand me, not just as an athlete, but as a human. They understood that I can have down days; we can have rough practices. And it was just really cool to know that they [also] had the confidence in me to be able to push me to my limit.”
Chiles’s memoir comes a few months after she gave her first live television interview on the Today Show regarding her efforts to reclaim her Olympic bronze medal, which was stripped following a controversial ruling during the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“It’s hard to tell yourself everything is going to be fine when we literally didn’t do anything wrong,” she said during the interview in November. Everything was in the time that it needed to be. For them to come back and say it was four seconds too late when we have proof … I can only control what my truth is and I know that we were right.”
When E! News asked Chiles if there were any updates about the medal on Tuesday night during the TIME Women of the Year Gala, she said she couldn’t provide any details.
“I really can’t say too much about the bronze medal,” she said. “I just know my attorneys are doing their best to figure everything out. I’m always going to fight and be my best self because that’s just who I am.”
