Eilish McColgan: Teacher sent me ‘body-shaming' abuse
Eilish McColgan says a school teacher has been amongst those who have abused her on social media over her body shape.
McColgan, who will make her London Marathon debut on Sunday, said that she quickly hit back at the teacher, who also had a daughter, calling her comments a disgrace, before they vanished and the account was suddenly deleted.
With the London Marathon organisation itself taking the decision to come off the social media platform X in protest at some of its unpleasant content, McColgan has suggested that making an account should become subject to mandatory verification.
The issue came to prominence last month when McColgan's mother, Liz, a winner of the London Marathon, highlighted some of the abuse her daughter had received.
Eilish, a four-time Olympian and the reigning 10,000m Commonwealth Games champion, Eilish has her own charity, Giving Back to Track, which aims to help young female athletes on their journeys, and she still believes she can do more good by staying on social media.
'I think verification would make a big difference… where someone has to link their passport or something because, at the moment, a lot of it's nameless and faceless,' she said. 'I always find it bizarre when people have their name and their face on there and they're fully brazen.
'A woman actually said something about my body shape, and she had a young girl in her profile picture who was actually her daughter and then she was a teacher. I wrote to her to say the fact that you are openly writing this on my page as a school teacher with a daughter is a disgrace. And then obviously they vanish. They delete it because they panic.
'A lot of the comments are men. One guy had three young daughters, and one of the comments he made was quite a sexualised comment. I wrote back to him saying, 'Could you imagine someone saying this to your daughters?' And then obviously he started to panic and thought, 'Oh, actually, yeah, you're right'.
'I think they just assume you're like a robot. You're not actually a human. You're not a person. You don't have a mum, a dad, a partner who's going to read that sort of stuff. It's very bizarre. I think maybe verification could be a pretty quick way, I think, to eradicate a lot of these messages.'
McColgan also highlighted the impact on her parents and why she will continue to post messages that are inspiring a much larger community of positive followers.
' It affects my mum way more than it affects me,' she said. 'For her, social media is relatively new. Whereas for me, I've become pretty numb to it. Some of them make me laugh. I just think it's so ridiculous.
'The only reason I call it out from time to time is that I know I have a lot of young kids who follow me, and I don't want them to read it and think that the reason I'm breaking the British record, or I'm fast, is because I starve myself to do it, or that skinny means fast.
'That's just such a bad narrative. It's also just not real. In order to get longevity in your career, your utmost priority is looking after yourself and your body. And it doesn't matter what these people online think. They're not your family, they're not your friends, they're people who are irrelevant.
'Someone on Linkedin said to me, 'Oh, you know you should just come off social media and just remove yourself entirely'. But why are you going to be teaching kids in school if they get bullied to stop going to school, or just stop doing what you enjoy because one person's ruining it for you?
'I have my own not-for-profit [charity] in Scotland, which is supporting young female athletes, and there's so many of them that get fed so much wrong information throughout their careers.
'And then it gets to the point where they just end up in horrible, vicious injury cycles and then just vanishing from sports. It's why we lose so many kids from the sport. So again, I think that's why I call it out.'
McColgan also now hopes to draw something of a line under the issue, understandably wanting the focus to return to her performances where she will make an eagerly awaited marathon debut on Sunday in an exceptional women's field. Her mother's Scottish record is one immediate goal and, longer term, she hopes to compete in what would be her fifth Olympics over the 26.2-mile course in Los Angeles.
She says that Sunday feels like a step into the unknown, admitting that she had never been more scared before a race but that the overriding feeling was still one of excitement.
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