Protecting young is officials’ No. 1 job
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Day in and day out, Simone Biles and her fellow athletes do their jobs. They go into their gyms, their pools, their courts and they work their butts off, for hours and hours on end, sacrificing the lives us ordinary people take for granted.
They do it because they’ve been blessed with talent, they love their sport and, ultimately, because they take pride in wearing those uniforms with U-S-A emblazoned on them.
And when it mattered most, the people whose job it was to protect Biles and every other athlete couldn’t do theirs.
Whether it was out of shortsightedness, fear or self-interest, it doesn’t really matter. Nothing can ever excuse the adults at USA Gymnastics, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and FBI from not doing their best for Biles and other vulnerable young athletes.
“Every day is a reminder of what I went through and what I’ve been through and what I’m going through and how I’ve come out of it,” Biles said Wednesday after practice for this weekend’s U.S. championships.
“It’s hard to talk about. It’s really hard to talk about,” she said, her eyes filling. “I just feel like – I don’t know. I don’t mean to cry. But it’s hard coming here for an organization, having had them fail us so many times. We had one goal and we’ve done everything that they’ve asked us for, even when we didn’t want to, and they couldn’t do one damn job.
“You had one job. You literally had one job, and you couldn’t protect us.”
That’s what it all comes down to, nearly three years after The Indianapolis Star, part of the USA TODAY Network, first revealed that Larry Nassar had sexually abused athletes under his care with USA Gymnastics and Michigan State.
The independent investigations and the congressional hearings – of course it’s important to find out how Nassar went unchecked for the better part of three decades, preying on 300-plus girls and young women, Biles included, and why sexual abuse is so prevalent in the Olympic movement. But too often it obscures the simplest fact: People who should have known better, done better, didn’t, and the lives of Biles and too many others will never be the same.
A report last week by a Senate committee revealed that the FBI, along with USA Gymnastics and the USOPC, failed to act on accusations Nassar was abusing athletes until he was arrested in the fall of 2016.
Worse, the understandable lack of trust Biles and other survivors have is holding back the entire movement, slowing the reckoning and reconciliation that is necessary if future generations of athletes are to be spared a similar fate.
USA Gymnastics is on its fourth CEO since March 2017, while the USOPC has undergone an entire overhaul of its leadership. The U.S. Center for SafeSport is still struggling to find its footing, overwhelmed by sexual abuse complaints from across the entire Olympic movement.
Meanwhile, the lawsuits filed by Nassar victims against USA Gymnastics and the USOPC remain unresolved, with mediation dragging on. And on and on.
Given all that, how can anyone expect Biles and the other survivors to move on? To heal? To not be suspicious of those who swear they are trying to do right by them?
“How can we trust them?” Biles asked, almost rhetorically. “They bring in new people all the time, and I automatically put (walls) up because the people that I had known for years failed us. … All we can do at this point is have faith that they’ll have our backs, they’ll do the right thing.
“But at the end of the day it’s just a ticking time bomb. We’ll see. It’s a waiting game.”
Every day, even when she’s tired or doesn’t want to, Biles does her job. It’s long past time we demand that the powers that be in the Olympic movement do the same.