USA Gymnastics in culture shift

FORT WORTH, TEXAS >> The U.S. gymnastics championships were over. The pressure — mercifully if only momentarily — gone. On the floor at Dickies Arena, Olympic hopefuls milled about aimlessly. Some talked. Some grabbed their phones. Others searched the stands for their families.

Jordan Chiles did what she usually does when there’s a lull in the action. She danced. Soon, a couple joined in. Then a few more. Then a few more. Within a minute or two, nearly the entire group was doing “The Cha Cha Slide” for all the world to see.

Martha Karolyi’s program, this is not.

The vibe around the top level of the sport in the United States has loosened in the five years since the highly successful yet highly divisive national team coordinator retired. The impromptu flash mob at national championships last month offered a symbolic if somewhat superficial glimpse at how the landscape is evolving.

“I feel like the trainings are actually kind of a lot more fun and not — I mean, it’s still stressful, but it’s not as stressful as it used to be,” said MyKayla Skinner, an alternate on the 2016 Olympic team who will be one of six American women competing in Tokyo this month.

Still, the greatest gymnast of all time wonders if the pendulum has swung too far, too fast.

Simone Biles has embraced the long-overdue push to create a more athlete-centric environment. Her concern, however, is that the sport’s brave new world might make it difficult for the coaches hired to mold prodigies into champions to effectively do their jobs.

“I think the culture shift is happening, but it’s almost as if the athletes almost have too much power and the coaches can’t get a rein on it,” Biles told The Associated Press in May. “So then it’s kind of wild. It’s like a horse out of the barn: You can’t get it back in.”

Biles, among the most outspoken critics of USA Gymnastics in the wake of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal and herself a Nassar survivor, is not complaining. It’s unlikely she would have returned to the sport in late 2017 if Karolyi was still in charge. Things needed to change.

Yet the 24-year-old is also acutely aware of the pressure that follows when the perennially loaded U.S. team is on the international stage.

The Americans have produced the last four Olympic all-around gold medalists and captured every major team title since the 2011 world championships, a streak they are heavily favored to extend in Tokyo

thanks in large part to Biles’ unmatched brilliance.

The question is what comes next. How will one of the gold standards of the U.S. Olympic movement foster a healthy, positive climate and a competitive one at the same time?

The two are not mutually exclusive by any stretch. Biles need only point to her relationship with former coach Aimee Boorman and current coaches Laurent and Cecile Landi as proof. Yet she also knows her experience is not exactly commonplace for a sport in the middle of a reckoning.

Gymnastics federations from the U.S. to Great Britain to Australia are grappling with their own version of a #MeToo movement as athletes in each country have come forward to detail a culture they viewed as toxic. Despite measures by leadership to push USA Gymnastics forward, the Nassar fallout isn’t going away anytime soon.