I was 15 years old when I walked into weightlifting.

Not because I sought it out, but because a coach who looked like me, a Caribbean man who understood what it meant to be from our communities, made a deliberate decision that people like me should not be excluded from this sport. The legendary George Manners.

That decision changed my life. It also exposed me to something I have spent years making sense of: the way Black girls in sport are systematically denied the grace afforded to children.

This is not just a personal grievance but rather a well-documented, research-backed phenomenon with real consequences for athlete development, well-being, and longevity in sport.

What Adultification Actually Means

Adultification is the process by which Black children are perceived and treated as older, more mature, and less in need of protection than their peers. It is well-studied in educational, legal, and social welfare contexts. In sport, it shows up in the way young Black female athletes are communicated with, evaluated, and held accountable. The expectations placed on them, the language directed at them, and the absence of protective care reflect an unconscious bias that entirely removes childhood from the equation.

Black girls are not seen as children first. They are seen as Black, and the default becomes treating them accordingly: demanding adult-level resilience, skipping the scaffolding of pastoral care, and interpreting confidence or composure as justification for harsher engagement.

I was 17 or 18 years old, standing on the back of a truck after a competition or a testing day, when a leader within a federation at the time told me directly that I came across as a bitch. I remember the shock of it. I remember processing it in real time and, almost instinctively, letting it run off my back.

That response, the ability to absorb, compartmentalise, and move on, was not a strength in that moment. It was a trained adaptation. By that age, I had already become so accustomed to managing hostile experiences alone that my first instinct was not to name what had happened, but to survive it. That is what adultification trains young Black athletes to do.

Today, I can clearly name it: that interaction was wholly inappropriate. It would have been inappropriate to direct at any young person. The fact that it was directed at me, in the way it was, is inseparable from how I was being perceived in that space.

The Role of Advocacy

I was fortunate. My coach, a Black man who had coached Black women in this sport long before me and who understood precisely the terrain they navigated, had already equipped me. He had built a protective layer around my development, not by shielding me from the sport’s demands, but by ensuring I understood the context in which I was operating and that I had someone in my corner who would name what others would not.

That kind of advocacy is a necessary infrastructure.

One of my favourite illustrations of advocacy appears in the documentary King Richard about the Williams sisters. Richard Williams repeatedly intervened when journalists, broadcasters, and officials engaged with Venus and Serena in ways that stripped the exchange of its youth. In one exchange, when a journalist asked Serena whether she was confident and then challenged Richard’s interruption, his response was direct: “She said yes, and that should be enough.” He understood that the journalist was not engaging with a child. He was insisting that she be treated as one.

That insistence, the act of interrupting, redirecting, and naming what is happening in real time, is what advocacy for young Black athletes looks like. It is a necessary corrective to a bias that would otherwise go unchallenged.

The Structural Question

We have to ask what the cost is when that advocacy is absent.

If a young Black athlete enters an elite environment without a coach, mentor, or trusted adult who understands this dynamic and is willing to intervene, what happens to her development? What happens to her relationship with the sport? What happens to her?

The research on adultification points consistently to outcomes that should concern every performance director, welfare officer, and federation leader: erosion of trust in institutions, internalised pressure to perform emotional and psychological labour that is not asked of peers, and eventual departure from sport environments that were never designed with their humanity in mind.

The question for sport is not whether this is happening. It is what we are prepared to do about it.

Moving Forward

Addressing adultification in sport requires honesty about where unconscious bias lives in our systems. It lives in recruitment conversations, in disciplinary processes, in the language coaches, officials, and administrators use with young Black athletes and in the latitude they are or are not given when they are struggling.

What is required is conscious, deliberate practice.

Bias shaped by culture, history, and institutional norms does not dissolve with good intentions. It requires active intervention: in safeguarding frameworks that specifically account for the racialised dimensions of athlete welfare, in the recruitment and development of diverse coaching staff who can provide culturally informed advocacy, and in the willingness of institutions to audit how their practices land differently on different bodies.

I was protected, but I was not immune. Many are not.

That gap, between those who happen to find the right coach and those who do not, is not acceptable as a structural outcome. The talent is there.

The question is whether the environment is worthy of it.

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Perceptions, Disparities, and the Weight of History

To truly understand injury in Black athletes, we must examine the systemic issues embedded in medicine, society, and institutions when it comes to the Black body. History is littered with examples of how Black bodies have been devalued and misunderstood, from the violence of transatlantic slavery, to unethical medical experimentation without anaesthesia, to persistent myths such as “Black people have a higher threshold for pain” or are “drug seeking” when reporting pain.

These misconceptions are not isolated; they permeate multiple domains, including maternity and the ongoing sickle cell health crisis, where conditions disproportionately affecting Black and ethnic minority groups are often minimised or misunderstood. The impact of these entrenched beliefs inevitably seeps into sports medicine. Many medical professionals, regardless of their intentions, are products of institutions where these biases can still influence clinical judgment.

The question is, how injured is injured when you are a black athlete?

Now I’m talking from experience as someone who has been asked, “Are you actually injured?” This period was around 2015. I was experiencing sciatica in both of my legs, and I was experiencing significant back pain, and it all stemmed from a competition in 2014. As I fell backwards, I was scared of landing on my back. I’d had a previous injury of breaking my wrists. I didn’t want any of that. I twisted out of it, catching my arm underneath the bar, but in that moment, I also caused what would be an injury that has stayed with me for a very long time, which is facet joint syndrome.

Despite significant pain, I was unsure how to proceed. I was on funding, seeing the available medical teams, yet answers were elusive because my symptoms would wax and wane, especially during lifting. There were stretches when I felt fine, only to be hit by periods of debilitating pain. During the World Championships in Houston, my back pain flared so severely that competing required tremendous resilience. My drive to perform, succeed, and represent was so strong that I was willing to repeatedly risk my health, even lying on the floor for massages between lifts, just to get through. It was a stark illustration of the lengths athletes often go to prove themselves, sometimes at great personal cost.

Eventually, I recognised that this pain had persisted too long, and I needed definitive answers.

Even as I sought medical help, the scepticism I encountered from leadership was palpable. I distinctly remember a performance director questioning, “Are you really injured? Do you really have back pain?” This, despite documented medical interventions and visible signs of distress, such as post-competition ice therapy administered by physiotherapists.

When I finally found an exceptional physio team who took my reports seriously, they quickly diagnosed the problem, implemented an effective treatment plan, and helped me manage the condition. Being believed was transformative; my symptoms were validated with MRI evidence and clinical reasoning. That moment underscored a critical point: questioning whether a Black athlete is “really” injured is rarely innocent.

It is often rooted in long-standing, systemic biases—like the myth of Black people’s higher pain tolerance that continues to undermine the care and credibility afforded to Black bodies, even at the highest levels of sport.

My experience is not an isolated one. Across sports, countless Black athletes wrestle with the dual burden of physical injury and having their pain questioned or dismissed. This is not just about individual moments of disbelief; it’s about the cumulative effect of a system that asks Black athletes to prove their pain, resilience, and even their humanity, time and again.

Change requires more than awareness; it demands action from sports organisations, medical teams, and society at large. We must challenge entrenched myths, improve representation in sports medicine, and foster environments where every athlete’s pain is treated with dignity and urgency.

As we move forward, the real question is not just “How injured is injured?” but “How do we create a culture where all injuries are acknowledged, investigated, and treated equitably, no matter whose body is on the line?”

By confronting these disparities head-on, we not only protect the health and careers of Black athletes but also move closer to a fairer, more compassionate sporting world for everyone.

Whether as a coach, manager, or healthcare provider, consider this an invitation to lead differently. Inclusive leadership isn’t just about representation; it’s about consistently challenging your own assumptions, creating space for every voice, and proactively addressing disparities that can cost athletes their health and careers.

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