Coaches Daniel Trepanier, centre, and Kevin Howard, left, speak with Canada's Brody Blair at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014. Boxing Canada high-performance director Trepanier is resigning effective immediately.Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press
Four days after dozens of Canadian boxers wrote an open letter to Sport Canada calling for the resignation of Daniel Trepanier, the Boxing Canada high-performance director has stepped down.
Boxing Canada’s president, Ryan Savage, made the announcement on Sunday, saying the sport organization will engage with the provincial governing bodies to strike a search committee in the coming weeks to hire a new high-performance director.
Wednesday’s letter, signed by 121 current and retired boxers – a number that more than doubled in the days since – spoke of a toxic culture within the federation.
Three-time world champion Mary Spencer was among the most outspoken, saying “[Trepanier] should have been fired a long time ago.”
The outcry caught the attention of the International Boxing Association, who pulled Trepanier’s accreditation from the women’s world championships that began Sunday in Istanbul.
“The open letter ... is of grave concern,” IBA secretary-general Istvan Kovacs said in an e-mail Friday to Boxing Canada. “There can be no room in our sport for the abuse of athletes and we ask for your co-operation in helping achieve this.
“The safeguarding of boxers and the boxing community more widely is, and will remain, a priority for the current IBA leadership team.”
Kovacs said the IBA’s integrity officer and ethics committee would be reviewing claims raised in the letter.
The athletes painted a picture of a hostile environment of homophobic, misogynistic and sexist comments. They wrote about safety concerns - including being forced to spar despite have concussion symptoms - and said there’s a lack of impartiality around things like the dispersal of funds, and rampant favouritism that clouds decisions around team selection.
“It’s a real problem when the high-performance director of a national boxing federation is openly against women boxing,” Spencer told The Canadian Press. “Somebody’s opinion shouldn’t stand in your way while preparing, but when you work with him, the way he treats women, it’s a huge obstacle.”
Spencer was one of Canada’s medal favourites ahead of the 2012 London Olympics, and claimed Trepanier used some of the $140,000 she received from Own the Podium for training to send her to a camp in Ireland ahead of the Games where there were no female athletes to spar with.
Boxing Canada’s board of directors held emergency meetings over the weekend to further improve its transparency and governance, Savage said in his statement.
The board, he said, has reiterated its commitment to a high-performance advisory board, the reinvigoration of a committee meant to ensure communication with the provincial bodies, mandatory safe sport training for coaches and staff, and the separation of the high-performance role from coaching responsibilities.
The boxing letter comes amid what Sport Minister Pascale St-Onge has called a safe sport “crisis” in Canada.