Longtime national team biathlete Joanne Firesteel Reid was sexually harassed by a wax tech for six years and it took U.S. Biathlon years to report the allegations to SafeSport, the Associated Press is reporting today.
A long, well-sourced article was recently published. You can read it here. The byline on it is Martha Bellisle; following Chelsea Little’s retirement from FasterSkier, Bellisle likely knows more about U.S. biathlon than any active journalist in this country.
I am limited in how much I can or should quote from someone else’s article, especially when that someone else clearly did a lot of work to report this herself. I want to give full deference to Bellisle’s article here.
Here is the first paragraph in full:
“U.S. Biathlon national champion Joanne Reid was sexually harassed and abused for years by a ski-wax technician while racing on the elite World Cup circuit, a watchdog group that oversees sex-abuse allegations in Olympic sports found. When the two-time Olympian complained, she says she was told his behavior was just part of the male European culture.”
Bellisle reports that Deedra Irwin, Reid’s longtime teammate on the national team, was outraged by what she was seeing. Bellisle reports that Irwin, who is affiliated with the Army National Guard, reported the alleged abuse to her military superiors, “who immediately demanded action.” Bellisle reports that officials with U.S. Biathlon then alerted SafeSport, many years after Reid’s initial allegations.
Bellisle reports that the wax tech in question was Petr “Gara” Garabík, a three-time Olympic biathlete between 1994 and 2002 for what is now the Czech Republic. She reports that the abuse began in 2016 and continued for many years, and that it included lewd jokes, repeated unwelcome touching, and a forced entry into Reid’s hotel room while drunk, including holding her down and trying to kiss her.
“Garabik told the AP in an email that the case against him was ‘complete nonsense from the start,’” Bellisle writes. “But he acknowledged to SafeSport investigators and the AP that his comments were sexual in nature.”
There is far more information in the AP article. Bellisle quotes from the internal SafeSport report: “An athlete sexually harassed by a wax tech would have trouble making him stop, ‘out of concern it would jeopardize the athlete’s performance,’ said confidential SafeSport reports on its investigation obtained by The Associated Press,” Bellisle writes.
Bellisle has quotes from Reid, who alleges that a recent ex post facto change in team selection criteria was retaliation for her reporting this, and from various officials with U.S. Biathlon, who roundly deny these allegations.
Bellisle reports that Garabík was suspended for six months and placed on probation through the end of this year. Bellisle has more public information than the SafeSport Centralized Disciplinary Database at present; there is no information about this case currently available through that database.
Garabík has not worked for U.S. Biathlon since November 2021, Bellisle reports.
Update: U.S. Biathlon issued this statement earlier today. It states, in part, that “Upon hearing of the allegations, U.S. Biathlon immediately reported the claims to the U.S. Center for SafeSport, removed the contractor from any further contact with athletes and cooperated fully with the investigation.”
Bellisle’s reporting states that Reid first reported abuse to then–national team coach Bernd Eisenbichler in 2019, and approached Lowell Bailey, High Performance Director for U.S. Biathlon, in 2020. Bellisle’s article states that it took U.S. Biathlon two years to bring the case to SafeSport.
Reid’s side of the story, at least her allegations that a SafeSport report led to a change in criteria, has been public for some time. She posted the above to her Instagram page on November 30, 2023.
A few days later, on December 2, Reid posted this follow-up:
Officials with U.S. Biathlon, in the AP article, denied that the change in criteria was retaliatory in nature.
— Gavin Kentch
