Former high jumping world champion and Olympic medal winner Patrik Sjoeberg sent shockwaves through the Swedish sports world yesterday with a new book claiming he was sexually abused by his coach.

“I am a victim, and I just wish I had had the courage to step forth while Viljo was alive,” Sjoeberg, 46, said in an interview with the Dagens Nyheter daily published to coincide with the release of his book: “What you didn’t see.”

In the book, Sjoeberg, who won the World Championships in Rome in 1987 and holds three Olympic medals, two silver and one bronze, from three separate Olympic Games, reveals that he over a long period of time was molested by his famed trainer and step father, Viljo Nousiainen.

Nousiainen, who died in 1999, has been viewed in Sweden as the genius largely responsible for the Scandinavian country’s advances in athletics, having coached among others former Olympic triple jump champion Christian Olsson and mentored former Olympic champion Stefan Holm.

“What Viljo did to me and to other children is the most important reason why I wrote this book. This is not about slandering someone who is dead, but about a story that needs to be told,” said Sjoeberg, who co-authored the book with journalist Markus Lutteman.

The former world champion explained that he had never told anyone about how his coach repeatedly used sports therapy as an excuse to get him naked and molest him until two years ago he was talking with former Swedish youth champion Christian Skaar Thomassen and discovered that he too had been abused by Nousiainen.

Stefan Holm meanwhile expressed shock at the revelations about the man he considered a mentor for 15 years.

“I don’t know if I have been blind or naive, but I have never heard anything about this,” he told Dagens Nyheter daily.