I thought about Strictly Come Dancing coach Giovanni Pernice yesterday as I panted and sweated my way through the last 10 minutes of a gruelling spin class. “Push through the pain!” my own instructor yelled, goading us all on to “a new personal best.”
In no other area of life would this kind of pressure be acceptable. Certainly school teachers are no longer allowed to use that kind of hectoring tone, to bully us through to greater heights. Yet in the athletic and dance worlds, we expect it – often, we want it.
How else do we break new boundaries? Surpass our own expectations?
“I am a perfectionist, 100 per cent,” the 33-year-old Strictly pro-dancer admitted on Sunday, as he defended himself for the first time over the controversy caused in 2023 when his one-time partner, actress Amanda Abbington, quit after just five weeks.
“It comes from a perspective of caring,” he insisted, adding: “And if we have good scores at the end, I do look back and say, ‘I’ve done a great job’.”
The 52-year-old Sherlock actress certainly didn’t see Pernice’s methods as “caring”. She went on to claim that she suffered PTSD after taking part in the ballroom competition. Yet even if we had witnessed their training sessions, how could we judge?
For all the professional athletes who have bravely come forward with harrowing stories of abuse at the hands of their coaches, there have been others who confessed that in hindsight, they owe their success to those often-ferocious methods.
So when one woman’s brilliant mentor can be another’s destructive demon, where is the line?
There has to be one, physically and emotionally, but getting everyone to agree on it may be almost impossible.
I thought about Strictly Come Dancing coach Giovanni Pernice yesterday as I panted and sweated my way through the last 10 minutes of a gruelling spin class. “Push through the pain!” my own instructor yelled, goading us all on to “a new personal best.”
In no other area of life would this kind of pressure be acceptable. Certainly school teachers are no longer allowed to use that kind of hectoring tone, to bully us through to greater heights. Yet in the athletic and dance worlds, we expect it – often, we want it.
How else do we break new boundaries? Surpass our own expectations?
“I am a perfectionist, 100 per cent,” the 33-year-old Strictly pro-dancer admitted on Sunday, as he defended himself for the first time over the controversy caused in 2023 when his one-time partner, actress Amanda Abbington, quit after just five weeks.
“It comes from a perspective of caring,” he insisted, adding: “And if we have good scores at the end, I do look back and say, ‘I’ve done a great job’.”
The 52-year-old Sherlock actress certainly didn’t see Pernice’s methods as “caring”. She went on to claim that she suffered PTSD after taking part in the ballroom competition. Yet even if we had witnessed their training sessions, how could we judge?
For all the professional athletes who have bravely come forward with harrowing stories of abuse at the hands of their coaches, there have been others who confessed that in hindsight, they owe their success to those often-ferocious methods.
So when one woman’s brilliant mentor can be another’s destructive demon, where is the line?
There has to be one, physically and emotionally, but getting everyone to agree on it may be almost impossible.