When a photographer captured France’s 2004 Olympic gymnastics champion Emilie Le Pennec urinating during the World Championships in 2005, the images ended up plastered across porn and fetish websites. But, such is the taboo around leaking, it is rarely discussed in the context of elite sport, let alone in wider society. Urinary incontinence is often talked about in the context of pregnancy and childbirth, which can weaken a woman’s pelvic floor. “It causes a bit of uncomfortableness and anxiety, which can obviously be distracting and can throw you off.” “If you’re having a bad day, you do worry about whether your pad is showing through the back of your leotard or if it’s coming out the side,” says Songhurst, a former European and world junior champion. More than a decade later, she still wears pads in her leotard, and can go through as many as four in a session. Her British team-mate Izzy Songhurst started experiencing incontinence issues aged 13. “I don’t drink very much during training, so when I get advice from the nutritionist and you have to drink X amount or this type of drink and you’re like, I just can’t do that.” “I go to the loo about five times per session,” she says. She counts herself lucky that stress incontinence has never been an issue throughout her career - her experience as a junior was just an isolated incidence - but it had a lasting impact. The 32-year-old has benefitted from regular educational pelvic floor workshops organised by British Gymnastics in conjunction with the English Institute of Sport which have helped scores of athletes to better understand and deal with the issue. Gallagher Cox, who represented Great Britain at last summer’s Tokyo Olympics, insists stress incontinence is now being talked about a lot more openly in her sport than when she first started out on the senior scene 17 years ago. I’ve been at competitions where I’ve seen girls pee as they take off – when they do a double back somersault you’ll genuinely see urine flying through the air.” “In terms of peeing, the worst time for it seems to be the younger girls just coming into puberty. “When we land from a jump, we put about 16 times our body weight through the trampoline,” explains Gallagher Cox. The issue is particularly endemic in trampolining, where research has shown incontinence to be prevalent in as many as 80 per cent of female athletes. It commonly occurs in athletes from high-impact sports that involve running, or jumping as in netball or gymnastics, where constant and excessive downward pressure is placed on the pelvic floor to the extent it becomes too tight. In female athletes, the problem commonly occurs when the pelvic floor – a group of muscles and ligaments with important functions, such as pelvic-organ support – is damaged over time. Unknown to her at the time, Gallagher Cox had experienced stress incontinence, the accidental loss of urine through physical exertion. I went to the loo and sorted myself out and changed my leotard. “It completely destroyed my warm-up,” reflects the Briton, 32. Out of nowhere, as she landed from a jump, she leaked. She was 15, competing at a national trampolining meet, and putting the final touches to the routine she would perform minutes later. Laura Gallagher Cox remembers the moment as if it was yesterday.
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