Fall of US Womens Gymnastics

Larry Nassar and the Risks of US Women’s Gymnastics

American gymnastics, particularly women’s gymnastics, has been one of the most popular summer Olympic sports for many decades. Even during non-Olympic years, it has a large following among young girls and their families. Many young girls dream of being the next Shannon Miller or Mary Lou Retton. Unfortunately, pursuit of these high athletic goals comes at a high price for some children. The high risk of injury, years of formative social and educational interactions, and even eating disorders are well-known as risks of the sport. A risk that was less publicized was the dangers of experiencing sexual abuse at the hands of trusted male members of the American Olympics team.
The recent online #metoo movement has brought to light many sexual crimes perpetuated by men against young girls and women in the entertainment industry. But the #metoo movement has its counterpart in the crimes of the team doctor for the women’s gymnastics team in the form of Larry Nassar. Nassar’s systematic sexual abuse of young girls highlights how unsupervised interactions with a trusted adult can leave young girls vulnerable to abuse. It also highlights the risks of a sport dependent upon young, underage girls who are often under the supervision of powerful adults who are more interested in exploiting them for personal and professional gain and pleasure than they are protecting them.
#Metoo and the Legacy of Abuse
The #metoo movement is powerful because it is a women-generated online community of sexual abuse survivors and supporters. Because of the powerful nature of many of the supporters of the perpetrators of abuse, for decades men exercised their powers with impunity. The entertainment and sports industries were cloaked in silence. Women were afraid of speaking up because they knew that even if they mounted a credible challenge to their abuser, they did so at a profound risk to their reputation. But Twitter and other online venues enabled women to generate personal connections and affirm one another’s stories in a powerful way.
The fall of Larry Nassar, the physician for the largely underage US women’s gymnastics team, was particularly unsettling. The team was widely praised for its athletic success but the world did not realize what the cost was of that success until very recently. What is equally shocking is the extent to which the crimes may never have been revealed were it not for a chain of improbable events. “Nassar was jailed for up to 175 years for abusing more than 150 women and girls but his crimes may never have come to light without an email to an Indiana newspaper” (Graham, 2018, par.2). Former gymnast Rachael Denhollander wrote the newspaper that while ostensibly under treatment for a back injury she had been molested by the team doctor.
Denhollander at the time of the abuse was a teenage girl afraid of speaking up and losing her ability to practice the sport she loved. She devoted years of her life to competition at a very young age. Now an attorney in her thirties, she was newly empowered and able to strike back and name her accuser, fully detailing his crimes in public. Still, the magnitude of her act of courage should not be downplayed. At the time of her accusation, Nassar was still a highly respected physician and member of the sports medicine community, a faculty member at Michigan State University (Graham, 2018). She also had no idea if others would come forward in support of her accusations.
The extent of the attitudinal sea change that has occurred in recent months is exemplified in the fact that so many women who have accused powerful men like Nassar, as well as Harvey Weinstein, Roman Polanski, and Woody Allen, have been making such accusations for years and people have turned a blind eye. According to gymnast McKayla Maroney, although she informed that Nassar had been molesting her in 2011, she was ignored (Bieler, 2018). “USAG has come under fire for having been told of the former team physician’s abuse of other athletes in 2015 and allegedly being slow to alert law enforcement, as well as for allegedly working to keep victims quiet” (Bieler, 2018). Maroney said that the times which she had been abused by Nassar numbered in the hundreds (Bieler, 2018). Denhollander likewise communicated the difficulty of speaking up about the abuse she was suffering. “I was confident that because people at MSU [Michigan State University] and [United States of America Gymnastics] USAG had to be aware of what Larry was doing and had not stopped him, there could surely be no question about the legitimacy of his treatment” (Graham, 2018, par.10).
There is also complicity amongst those who did nothing when they knew of the abuse, even though they did not perpetuate it. Knowing that revealing the abuse would incur bad publicity for the sport, accusations of turning a blind eye stretch all the way to the governing boards of the sport and some of the most respected Olympic coaches. The president of Michigan State and the school’s athletic director resigned after considerable public pressure, and the USAG board members likewise were forced to resign (Graham, 2018). The sport has lost critical sponsorship and it is uncertain if it will be able to recover its sponsorship in time for the next Olympics. “Corporate sponsors like AT&T, Procter & Gamble, Hershey’s, Under Armour and Kellogg’s, once enamored with the wholesome, family-friendly image put forth by Olympic champion gymnasts, have all severed ties” (Graham, 2018, par.18).
Bela Karolyi, who first came to prominence coaching the Russian prodigy Nadia Comaneci and has since made a career in the United States as a famous gymnastics coach was  implicated in the investigation of Nassar’s crimes (Graham, 2018). Although he is not named as an abuser, many of the incidents of abuse occurred at Karolyi’s gym (Graham, 2018). The governing body USGA announced that it has severed all of its ties with the ranch and Karolyi’s future in the sport remains in doubt. Again, this is another serious blow to the sport given the centrality of this coach and his wife in past Olympic successes. Effectively, it has been alleged that in the past that the USGA made a devil’s bargain of looking the other way at Karolyi’s and Nassar’s abusive behavior and attitude in exchange for success at the sport: “...while the Karolyis are credited with dramatically improving the performance and medal counts of the U.S. women's team, gymnasts in the U.S. and Romania told AP that the couple were verbally, emotionally and sometimes physically abusive” (Weiss & Mohr, 2018, par.11).
Histories of Abuse
It is worth noting that accusations of exploitation have long dogged women’s gymnastics even before the Nassar scandal came to light. Although the #metoo movement is predominantly about accusations of sexual and physical abuse, emotional abuse is also a major point of criticism leveled against a sport dependent upon underage girls. Many girls have reported being verbally abused by their coaches to the point of psychological damage. As noted by Weiss & Mohr (2018), girls were often intimidated into training through broken bones and other severe injuries. The girls were well aware of the pressure they were under to succeed for the good of the team and the sacrifices their parents had made for them. Such pressure can be psychologically devastating for any child, but particularly for girls at the vulnerable ages of the children aspiring for a place on the women’s gymnastics team.
The girls in Karolyi’s gym were pressured to eat as little as possible. Not only were eating disorders and proper nutrition ignored; disordered eating was actively encouraged. “Their meager diets and extreme training often delayed puberty, which some coaches believed was such a detriment that they ridiculed girls who started their menstrual cycles,” despite the mental risks posed to the girls in regards to attitudes to their sexuality and the physical risks to bones from delayed puberty (Weiss & Mohr, 2018, par. 7).  
Being obedient to all orders and directives was one of the requirements of submitting to training. “The Karolyis’ oppressive style created a toxic environment in which a predator like Nassar was able to thrive,” given that girls were effectively raised in a culture of silence where everything adults told them to do was correct (Weiss & Mohr, 2018, par. 5).  The culture of obedience fostered a culture of sexual abuse that was linked to a culture of emotional abuse, founded in fear and intimidation. “Girls were afraid to challenge authority, Nassar was able to prey on vulnerable girls and, at the same time, he didn't challenge the couple's harsh training methods” (Weiss & Mohr, 2018, par. 5).
In fact, Nassar’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the eating disorders and emotional abuse inflicted upon the girls is a powerful answer to the nagging question of why Karolyi and his wife ignored what was transpiring. According to one of the gymnasts who testified at Nassar’s trial and sentencing: “the doctor [Nassar] cleared her one time to train at the Karolyi complex on an ankle that turned out to be fractured” (Weiss & Mohr, 2018, par. 13). Nassar’s qualifications as a doctor were dubious, she notes, but rather it was his willingness to keep Karolyi’s secrets about the level of abuse and the eating disorders at his ranch. In effect, he was allowed to sexually abuse the girls under his change so Karolyi could abuse the girls in the manner he believed was necessary for the success of the team.
Karolyi is a product of the Cold War era training system for athletes, which was often brutal and unsparing in a way that would be considered unacceptable in many other contexts in the United States. But because of his success and winning record, the inappropriate nature of his training and expectations were ignored, even by parents, and the girls he was training knew no other differences. The ability of Nassar to carry on so long is particularly sobering given that this was despite the fact that Texas as one of the strongest legal standards for reporting child abuse in the United States. “Failure to do so is a misdemeanor punishable by jail time and a fine” (Weiss & Mohr, 2018, par. 22). In other words, people were willing to risk jail time to allow Nassar to continue in his abusive actions, for the alleged larger good of the team.
Conclusion
The future of American gymnastics remains in doubt. On one hand, there are clearly very talented young women who are still able to perform at a high level. Abuse is not necessary for the team to succeed, despite the apparent belief of many people involved in women’s gymnastics that this was the case. But without Karolyi and without the relative lack of supervision of coaches, the sport clearly has a great deal of housecleaning to do before it will be trusted again. Additionally, its dependence upon underage, prepubescent bodies is unique, even in the relatively youth-focused world of athletics, despite new age restrictions upon when athletes can compete. It is a sport effectively structured around the use of young girls who are put under the charge of much older men (and some women), often living far away from their parents and under the care of adults. Fortunately, in the era of #metoo change has finally come to the sport and the presence of online and media scrutiny will prevent such abuses from happening again.