He started a trial at the district court in Hradec Králové with former national table tennis coach Michal L. He is accused of a particularly serious criminal offense of sexual abuse of a fourteen-year-old trustee.
List News The story of the top player in question was described in July last year and they also talked to other charges of the accused coach. Michal L. then refused to talk to the editors. Now, for the first time, he has spoken in court. He denied any guilt. The girls allegedly made up everything.
Prosecutor Michaela Hartman, however, did not believe him. The indictment, which she read at the beginning of the trial, states: breasts, including nipples. “
According to the indictment, Michal L., 65, at the time justified the girl by saying that there should be a close relationship between the coach and the ward, because it is good for her career development. He allegedly explained to the player where the erogenous zones are on the body.
“The victim trusted him and was afraid that if she did not respect his training and rehabilitation plan, he would not want to train her and she would not have the opportunity to be in the national team,” said Attorney General Hartman. For sexual abuse of a child under the age of fifteen, she proposed a sentence of 2 to 2.5 years in prison with a two- to three-year condition and a ban on training young people for two to three years.
Right at the beginning of the trial, the chairman of the judicial panel, Zdeněk Roch, offered Michal L. the opportunity to conclude an agreement on guilt and punishment.
“I totally deny guilt. What was said here is not true, “the former coach refused the offer and during the interrogation he explained how the massages went according to him.
“It was two to three massages. They were professional, lasted about 20 to 30 minutes and I only massaged the player in question. I must refuse that it is for the purpose of my sexual gratification and that I would be talking about erogenous zones. “Every time the player left, she was satisfied and thanked,” he said in court.
When asked if he gave the same massage care to other wards or wards, Michal L. replied that he had more or less not massaged since graduating from university and, with the exception of the aforementioned representative, did not massage another ward.
Towel ball and vibrators
According to the investigation, former national team coach Michal L. did not behave unacceptably towards only one player. Many of his other trustees testified in the preparatory proceedings. Two of them shared their experience with the Report List last year.
For example, the cadet representative from 2011/2012 described that the players were afraid of the defendant. “He often threatened to expel us from the national team, and he had terrible bullshit and sexually explicit allusions to it,” recalls the now adult woman at his early stage.
“For example, when one of us was washing our heads in the bathroom, he told her that he would bend it over the sink and it would work. Or he warned us in the pool to watch out as we moved that he might have a lump on the towel. Another time he talked about vibrators. ”
Another sportswoman, whom Michal L. trained from 2014 to 2019 at the Youth Center in Hradec Králové, described that it was not just about sexually explicit allusions. The doomed man wanted her to film her underwear or asked her to dance for him. In both cases, she refused, which allegedly caused his anger.
As she described, he had put her in awkward situations several times. Example? Accommodation at an international tournament, where she was with Michal L. and his son.
“I was about fifteen,” she recalled. “He said the club had little money, so he booked one apartment for everyone. When I returned from training, I noticed that the two originally separated beds were suddenly pushed together. We slept side by side and touched my feet through my pajamas. I didn’t have the strength to oppose him, we were all afraid of him, “the table tennis player, whom he trained from the age of eleven to sixteen, confided in the newsroom.
“It’s revenge and a power struggle.”
In court, the former national team coach denied all this. He allegedly had no ambiguous remarks about the players, did not speak vulgarly and did not suggest anything sexual. “It simply came to our notice then. I didn’t use or say anything like that. ”
He also refused to threaten to expel anyone from the national team. In practice, this is not possible, because it is not only he, but also the executive committee of the Czech Table Tennis Association that decides who will or will not be in it.
Moreover, at the mentioned foreign tournament, it was said to be completely different. “The beds were three and were separated by a bedside table. I was not interested in sleeping with her in a double bed, “the former coach refused in court.
So what’s the point, he think, of inventing a few girls of different ages, from different stages of his coaching career, some of whom haven’t known each other until recently?
“It is a revenge and a power struggle. Someone wants to use this case to liquidate the club where I worked, to dismiss the executive committee of the Czech Table Tennis Association and settle accounts. This is how I perceive it. And I insist that the whole case is a fabricated, untrue and ugly thing that someone says about me is not true, “says the accused former 56-year-old coach.
The main trial will continue in June, questioning other witnesses, including players, their parents and table tennis officials. By the way, they are charged with the fact that they knew about the coach’s behavior, did not remove him from the youth and deliberately trampled everything.
Trustee abuse in sport? This is not the first case
List News in recent days has reported a similar case of sexual abuse by trustees by their coach. In mid-February, former national kickboxing coach Martin Zavoral was convicted of rape and sexual coercion. He pleaded guilty in court and received a three-year sentence with a five-year condition and a five-year ban on martial arts training for people under the age of eighteen. The list reports, however, pointed out that he continued to work with the young charges in his gym; according to eyewitness accounts, his actions acted as training.
