'Blows my mind': Morgan Mitchell lifts the lid on awful body-shaming
Aussie athletics star Morgan Mitchell has lifted the lid on the disgusting reality of social media fame, as well as the reason she has moved to an all-female coaching staff.
The 27-year-old Olympian has opened up about being body-shamed in a new podcast in which she revealed some of the nasty comments she regularly receives.
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Mitchell told the 'Uninterrupted' podcast by Women’s Health Australia that she had to take a break from the sport following the Olympics in 2016 because of some of the comments about her body.
Mitchell, who helped Australia reach the final of 4x400m relay in Rio, said she put on four kilograms in the off-season - resulting in trolls labelling her 'fat'.
“I was getting BMI testing every three weeks. If I showed you what I looked like in 2017... I wouldn’t eat breakfast and then I’d train, eat a muesli bar and maybe half a salad roll for dinner,” she said.
The 800m runner has 110,000 followers on Instagram, but said she's still blown away by some of the comments that trolls come out with.
“All I’ve ever heard is, ‘You’re so skinny, you look great’ or ‘oh, you’ve got cellulite on your thighs, you’re going to run slow’," she said.
"Now that I’m reflecting on it, it just makes me laugh.
“It used to really eat away at me but now I’m like, how could people? How could you say that to someone? It blows my mind.”
Morgan Mitchell's all-female support staff
Mitchell now employs an all-female coaching and support staff because women understand her body better.
“The thing for me, when I was transitioning (from the 400m to 800m event) and I got rid of my whole team,” she said.
“I found a new coach and was like, yep, she’s a female. My sport psych, yep, she’s a female. My manager, yep, female.
“Women understand women. That’s one thing I found I just couldn’t get with men. They just didn’t want to know, they’d say ‘toughen up and move on, do this, do that'.
“You shouldn’t be complaining without understanding because they’d never been in a woman’s body.
"And my coach is awesome because she just goes, ‘If you come to training and hit my times that I want you to hit, I couldn’t care what you look like’.”
Mitchell, who famously featured in 2018 Netflix doco 'The Game Changers' has previously copped backlash from fitness YouTuber Chris Kruger.
In 2019, Kruger said Mitchell had “cottage cheese thighs” as a result of her switch to a vegan diet.
“At the end of the day, yes, I get dimples, I’ve always had dimples before I was even vegan,” she said.
“I’m always going to be a little bit heavier in off season, I’m not going to win every race, flaws are OK and I had so many people reminding me of that.”
Mitchell represented Australia at the Olympic Games in 2016, as well as 2021 in Tokyo.
She also went to the Commonwealth Games in 2014 in Glasgow and 2018 on the Gold Coast.
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