For USA Gymnastics, a problem of trust
Failures persist 5 years after abuse scandal
TOKYO – When the Tokyo Olympics end, the powers that be at USA Gymnastics will be forced to do some selfevaluation.
Even before rising anxiety caused “the twisties” and forced Simone Biles to withdraw from the team, all-around and individual competitions, she said she would take a break after Tokyo. Now that the Russian women are on the rise, the Americans will have to reevaluate where they are as a program.
On the men’s side, the Americans finished fifth for a third consecutive Olympics, and there was widespread acknowledgment that they are not in the same class as Russia, Japan or China.
These are not the only considerations for USA Gymnastics.
Five years ago, the revelations of Larry Nassar’s monstrous crimes laid bare a culture of fear and intimidation at USA Gymnastics that helped the longtime team physician avoid detection for as long as he did.
Although improvements have been made, gymnasts and others within the sport said the lack of transparency, the discarding of athletes when they’re no longer of use and the gaslighting still occur.
“Improvement is a relative term,” Jessica O’Beirne, creator and co-host of the Gym Castic podcast, told USA TODAY Sports. “The culture is better compared to the largest abuse ring in sports history, yes. But in an effort to do no harm, not hurt anyone’s feelings, USA Gymnastics is leaving yet another pile of bodies – gymnasts who feel lied to, used and abandoned under the guise of ‘transparency.’ ”
Athletes praise CEO Li Li Leung – the federation’s fourth CEO in the past five years – for trying to change the culture. The women talk about training camps that are less rigid, both physically and psychologically. Selection procedures for the men’s team are clearer and include an independent observer.
Athletes are surveyed for their opinions more frequently, and their responses have driven changes. The Tokyo teams, for example, stay at a hotel near the arena after expressing concerns about being in the Olympic Village during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I said this from Day One: This is not something that’s going to happen overnight. This is going to take multiple years,” Leung told USA TODAY Sports. “Building trust takes time. Changing culture takes time. Getting buy-in takes time.
“We can sit here and write all the policies that need to be implemented,” she said. “At the end of the day, all of those policies and procedures and how we’re acting differently, it takes time to trickle down into the clubs and have a daily impact on athletes and the coaches.”
‘A sense of false hope’
Several incidents within the past two months illustrate how those underlying problems persist – and raise the question of whether there is a commitment to change, or just quieting the bad PR.
National team coordinator Tom Forster initially said the Tokyo team would be picked based on scoring potential, only to go in rank order. Grace McCallum, who was fourth, was part of the four-person team while MyKayla Skinner, who was fifth, competed as an individual – even though Skinner would have given the Americans a higher possible score.
“Our athletes are so strong that I don’t think it’s going to come down to tenths of a point in Tokyo,” Forster said after the Olympic trials. “We didn’t feel like it was worth changing the integrity of the process simply for a couple of tenths.”
Aside from that prediction being blindly arrogant – Biles withdrew after one event in the team final because mental health concerns caused her to lose her air awareness, and the U.S. women finished nearly 31⁄2 points behind Russia – that reasoning wasn’t clear to the athletes.
Though neither McCallum nor Skinner had issues with their selections, both said they didn’t know the rationale behind them.
Only four alternates were selected for the Tokyo team, despite Leung saying USA Gymnastics would take “up to five” because of COVID-19 concerns and the men naming five. The woman who finished 10th, Shilese Jones, said in an Instagram post that she felt she and her coach were “treated like we’re nobody’s (sic). … Just know they’ll ignore you now, but they’ll need you later.”
“Overall, the transparency regarding team selection is still very secretive,” Morgan Hurd, the 2017 world champion, told USA TODAY Sports. Despite Hurd being the only American to win allaround medals at the international level since Rio, her petition for the Olympic trials was denied.
“It just feels like there’s no set criteria and, what there is, they don’t stick to,” Hurd said. “That gives a sense of false hope.”
Allan Bower, an alternate in Tokyo, was the only member of the team not invited to the world team selection camp later this year. He was the only one not to receive funding to help defray the costs of his training, a fact he learned only when his coach received notification that another one of his athletes would. Bower received funding, but only through the end of August.
Paul Juda, whose score at the Pan American Championships earned the U.S. men an extra spot for the Tokyo Olympics, also was not funded – despite the Men’s Program Committee indicating he should have had priority.
These slights pale in comparison with the abuse gymnasts were subjected to by Nassar, but when an organization doesn’t live up to being “athlete-centric,” as USA Gymnastics loudly proclaims, questions about culture will persist.
“It’s people, athletes and young adults you’re dealing with,” 2005 world champion Chellsie Memmel said, “and I don’t know if people forget that sometimes.”
Leung acknowledged that USA Gymnastics needs to do better with its communication and will try to address these examples after Tokyo.
“We want to have very clear selection procedures. We try up front to have communication,” Leung said. “What happened afterward was really unfortunate. We don’t want any athlete to feel they have been unrightly snubbed.”
Can’t do everything at once
Some of USA Gymnastics’ problems stem from the volume of turnover the organization has had since the Nassar revelations in September 2016. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee forced out the previous board of directors, and Leung overhauled the leadership structure after she was hired in February 2019. Much of the support staff is new, too.
Though many of these changes were needed, the loss of institutional knowledge has been enormous. After the national championships, several athletes no longer in the running for Tokyo got emails from the USOPC outlining the requirements for anyone in the U.S. Olympic delegation. It was salt in the wounds to athletes nursing a colossal disappointment, and it could have been avoided had someone at USA Gymnastics known to update the list of potential team members.
Leung has said repeatedly that USA Gymnastics’ new “north star” is what is best for the athletes, and she insists that is “not just a talking point.”
“When we sit around a table and make decisions, that’s what drives us. We always ask, ‘How is it best for the athlete and our community?’ ” she said. “That doesn’t mean we can do everything at once. We don’t have the resources or the manpower to do everything at once.
“But, ultimately, at the core of who we are as an organization, that’s what drives us.”
Promises of change, new procedures and an extensive catalog of webinars mean little so long as athletes distrust the system.
Forster’s talk about the “integrity of process” is meaningless unless there is consistency and the resulting decisions are easily explainable to every gymnast, regardless whether they make the team or not.
“There is still a changing goal post,” O’Beirne said. “There’s almost like a gaslighting. Things are better, there’s transparency. But there’s the same fear that they have no idea what to do or why they earned the spots that they did.”
There also remains a fear that if athletes speak out, there will be repercussions – for themselves, for their teammates, for their coaches. Too often, complaints are not aired until there’s no longer anything to lose.
Bower is headed to medical school in the fall of 2022, but he said he worries whether his complaints will be used against his Oklahoma teammates.
“When I was selected as the alternate, I was very happy with everything I did. I hit all my routines, I did everything I could. When I heard the news (about the funding and world team camp snubs), it was taken away from me, in a sense,” Bower said. “My happiness, everything I’d trained for, was squashed. Diminished.
“The thing I don’t want is to have something like this happen to a kid with an Olympic dream,” he said. “Who has trained their entire lives and then to just be overlooked and thrown out of the sport when their time comes.”
Told what Bower said, Leung said she doesn’t want any athlete to feel that way. But he does, and he’s not the only one.
Therein lies the problem. Even after five years of lawsuits and relentless criticism, even after the turnover and new procedures, there remains a fundamental lack of trust.
So long as that exists, gymnasts will feel as if they’re disposable.
“I don’t think you’ll ever get to the point where absolutely every person is going to be happy. That’s just how life is,” Memmel said. “But I think it could get to the point where it’s better and seems more fair. If there was more open communication or if you say something, you stick to it. Where people can actually see there is that effort instead of people feeling, ‘You said this in this interview and then you didn’t do this and you did do this.’
“That’s the part that gets to people the most.”