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Sarah Craven had her sights set on the Olympics. The 21-year-old was the top lightweight in the University of Victoria rowing program at the start of the 2018-19 season and she says her new coach, Olympic silver medallist Barney Williams, could tell she was eager.

But as the season progressed, Craven says she noticed there was an “inside” and an “outside” to the program. She found herself on the inside, where she says she fielded calls from Williams about what her teammates were doing wrong — information he’d use to “torment” them — and she watched as he berated or ignored others and banished some from the water entirely.

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“I feel so guilty that I didn’t do anything and I didn’t protect my teammates,” Craven says. “But at the same time, I kind of needed to protect myself because I wanted to go to the Olympics.

“He took advantage of that. He took advantage of my ambition and my dreams and used that to blind me from what he was doing to these girls.”