PREDATOR OF Athlete A On Netflix from Wednesday
Gymnastics sex scandal is grim tale ANDY’S RATING:
SOME Netflix subscribers will be put off by the grim subject of this jaw-dropping documentary.
It tells how paedophile Larry Nassar was allowed to work as the doctor for the young athletes in the US women’s gymnastics team.
As in the Oscar-winning drama Spotlight, the story was broken by a team of investigative reporters who quickly discovered a cover-up had taken place.
But this important film doesn’t stop there, broadening out the scandal to take in the modern Olympic movement.
The film begins with Maggie Nichols, known in court papers as “Athlete A”, telling how she stopped attending school to chase a gold medal.
After relating how her 2015 complaint about Nassar was covered up, the film explains how women’s gymnastics became a sport performed almost exclusively by children.
Grainy footage takes us back to 1976 and 14-year-old Romanian Nadia Comaneci’s ground-breaking triumph at the Montreal Olympics.
Trainers Márta and Béla Károlyi had delivered a huge propaganda victory for dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. When they defected to the West in 1981, USA Gymnastics hired them to spearhead an American comeback.
Over the next four decades, the Károlyis would effectively snatch American children from school teams to train them at their private ranch.
Mental and physical abuse would be so commonplace that Nassar, pictured bottom right, could hide in plain sight.
When medals led to lucrative advertising deals, USA Gymnastics put marketing executive Steve Penny in charge. Under his