Time to start anew?
In wake of abuse scandal, many see need to do away with USA Gymnastics as sport’s governing body
The Monday on which disgraced former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar will be sentenced in Lansing, Mich., will be another training day in suburban Montgomery County at the gym owned by the family of Simone Biles, the defending Olympic all-around champion.
It will be another day of workouts in northwest Houston for former NCAA champion Colin Van Wicklen and in Colorado Springs, Colo., for two-time Olympian Sam Mikulak as both count down the days until they join other gymnasts on the Saturday before the Super Bowl for the year’s first major men’s competition, the Houston National Invitational.
It also will be another day of business at USA Gymnastics headquarters in Indianapolis, one day closer to the American Cup championships in Chicago in March, the national championships in Boston in August and to the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.
Increasingly, though, longtime coaches and some former gymnasts, including some of the young women who were sexually assaulted by Nassar under the guise of medical treatment, are broaching the possibility that while gymnastics will endure, it may be time for USA Gymnastics, the sport’s governing body since 1970, to go away.
While the federation’s leadership has expressed sympathy for Nassar’s victims and promised change is on the way, “Talk is cheap,” four-time Olympic gold medalist Aly Raisman said Friday at Nassar’s sentencing hearing in Lansing.
Referring to Kerry Perry, who was named Dec. 1 as USA Gymnastics CEO, Raisman said, “I have never met you, and I know you weren’t around for most of this. Unfortunately, you have taken on an organization that is rotting from the inside.”
Raisman continued: “For this sport to go on, we need to demand real change, and we need to be willing to fight for it. It’s clear now that if we leave it up to these organizations, history is likely to repeat itself.
“Now is the time to acknowledge that the very person who sits before us now — who perpetrated the worst epidemic of sexual abuse in the history of sports, who is going to be locked up for a long, long time — this monster was also the architect of policies and procedures that are supposed to protect athletes from sexual abuse for both USA Gymnastics and the USOC.”
A growing outcry
Calls to decertify USA Gymnastics as the national governing body for the sport have mounted over the last year.
John Manly, the Los Angeles attorney who is representing more than 100 women in a lawsuit against the federation, Nassar and Bela and Martha Karolyi, owners of the Sam Houston National Forest ranch where the women’s national team has trained for almost two decades, asked the U.S. Olympic Committee last March to revoke the federation’s authority.
“The entire USA Gymnastics leadership and management shares the blame for this failure,” Manly wrote. “If the wholesale rape of hundreds of children because of organizational culture and indifference is not enough, then respectfully, what is?”
The USOC has moved against corrupt or inefficient NGBs before. In 2003, it decertified the U.S. Taekwondo Union, citing financial irregularities and other shortcomings. Fencing, team handball and modern pentathlon also have undergone organizational changes since 2000.
“The history is too bad for us to have a chance to repair (USA Gymnastics),” said Paul Ziert, a former longtime coach and publisher of International Gymnast magazine. “It cannot be repaired. Every single person reminds us of what happened.”
Decertification would not be without difficulties, if temporarily, for athletes, because it would change the manner in which gymnasts, particularly in the men’s elite program, receive funding. The U.S. Olympic Committee in 2003 funded taekwondo athletes until a new governing body was established.
At least one prominent coach noted last week that just as USA Gymnastics was created to advance the sport beyond the level it achieved under the direction of the Amateur Athletic Union, perhaps USA Gymnastics has now outlived its usefulness.
On top of that, he noted, the federation faces an uncertain future because of the pending California lawsuit and the possibility of more litigation. Also, the Orange County Register last year reported that Procter & Gamble and Hershey’s were prepared to end their sponsorship agreements in the wake of the Nassar case, and ESPN reported that Under Armour was seeking an early exit to its sponsorship deal.
Hilton, which announced with great fanfare in 2011 a sponsorship deal that included major upgrades for the living quarters at the Karolyi Ranch, ended its 11-year association with the federation after 2016.
Changes in the governing body of gymnastics also could result in a change in the women’s semi-centralized training system created by the Karolyis in which athletes train at their home gyms but meet once monthly for group training.
USA Gymnastics last week announced it would no longer use the Karolyi Ranch for training camps and canceled a camp scheduled to begin Monday. It has not announced plans for a new training site.
Women’s team should remain best
Such has been the dominance of the U.S. women in recent years — the Americans led China by almost 10 points after preliminary rounds at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics and won the team final by eight points over Russia — that some have suggested the team could remain dominant even with fewer training camps.
“You could put together a team that would train together, maybe, once every three months, and they would still beat anybody in the world by four points,” one coach said. “And if Simone Biles comes back and stays healthy, they’d win by seven.”
Even as the future of USA Gymnastics is in question, gymnastics itself goes on. Tim Erwin, director of the gymnastics program at the Jewish Community Center, expects more than 3,500 male and female athletes in various disciplines for the Houston National Invitational in early February at NRG Park.