"It did not have to happen."
August 4, 2016 11:12 AM   Subscribe

A blind eye to sex abuse: How USA Gymnastics failed to report cases.

With the Olympics on the immediate horizon gymnastics begins to come back into the public eye. Indystar has filed a longform report on sexual abuse by coaches in top level gymnastics and the neglect of USA Gymnastics.
posted by Talez (60 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
Between this, the extreme "stage parenting" that goes on in it, the serious risk of injury to children, and the fact you can't carry it into adulthood anyway, I can scarcely think of a sport I'd like to see disappear more.
posted by Mitrovarr at 11:29 AM on August 4, 2016 [19 favorites]


I know mefis love to hate on sports but maybe we could read the article and not just start out with calls for all out ban on an entire athletic endeavor?

Many many people played sports as kids and had wonderful affirming experiences with it. Many of us even enjoy vigorous exercise as adults and prize and admire physical accomplishments. There's nothing wrong with being a driven competitive athlete and athletics are FAR from the only place abuses occur.
posted by fshgrl at 11:49 AM on August 4, 2016 [36 favorites]


A blind eye to sex abuse: How USA Gymnastics [the Catholic Church] [various college sports programs] [Fox News] [any other institution that values its money, status, and reputation more than it does the people is ostensibly serves] failed to report cases.
posted by rtha at 11:52 AM on August 4, 2016 [63 favorites]


I'm not hating on all sports or even on the concept of gymnastics. But the way modern gymnastics is done is pretty terrible and the sport as a whole needs huge, huge reform.
posted by Mitrovarr at 11:53 AM on August 4, 2016 [19 favorites]


The real takeaway from all of these stories is that this is everywhere. That doesn't remove the blame from USA Gymnastics, it just means it's also on everyone else, too.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 11:53 AM on August 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


Also, you know what I would start with in the reforms? A total ban on minors competing above the state level (including comparing performances via video or whatever). That would take a huge chunk out of stage parenting and the sports > all else mentality, which is one of the largest motivations for ignoring this kind of abuse.
posted by Mitrovarr at 12:00 PM on August 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


When you look at a lot of chronic cases of child abuse, where you have multiple children abused over a period of time, a common thread is certainly that someone within the institution knew and failed to report.

It kills me that there exists a common thread among child abuse cases.
posted by Dashy at 12:00 PM on August 4, 2016 [7 favorites]


a common thread is certainly that someone within the institution knew and failed to report.

Not just institutions, accusations of sexual abuse within families is often disbelieved.
posted by BrotherCaine at 12:03 PM on August 4, 2016 [8 favorites]


Many many people played sports as kids and had wonderful affirming experiences with it.

There is a massive, massive, like, Grand Canyon-scale gap between "play[ing] sports as kids" and the total dedication to it that make an athlete competitive at an Olympic level. SImone Biles started training with a coach at eight. She was competing at a world level at sixteen. She was homeschooled for pretty much her entire adolescence because of the demands of the sport.
posted by Etrigan at 12:05 PM on August 4, 2016 [37 favorites]


Oh, and I forgot to mention -- that's why a lot of us (even those of us who force their kids to take up a school-sanctioned sport and put 5K training and Just 6 Weeks apps on their phones) think that gymnastics (especially women's gymnastics) is particularly odious. There is simply no way to be competitive if you don't start before the age of 10. Three of the Fierce Five from 2012 retired from the sport before they could legally drink alcohol.
posted by Etrigan at 12:22 PM on August 4, 2016 [10 favorites]


Ugh. This is awful.

The molested girls were between the ages 10 - 14. How in the hell did the organization receive reports on 50 abusive coaches and not take action?
posted by zarq at 12:23 PM on August 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


I disagree.

I've competed in a number of sports (hockey, canoe/kayak, "nordic" skiing) at a semi-casual level through my teen with peers that went on to Olympic competition and a few medals. We went to school together, had normal social teen lives. There certainly is a continuum of dedication to sport, but it's absolutely not true in my experience that young future Olympians are something othered and apart from a more main-stream childhood and teenage experience.
posted by bonehead at 12:24 PM on August 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


Couldn't we solve this and other problems by requiring that female athletes be coached by women? It's weird to see so many women's Olympic teams with male coaches, or not weird at all considering the patriarchy.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:27 PM on August 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


I don't think that's true of young future Olympians in general, but it is true of young future Olympian women's gymnasts. I don't even think it's true of young future men's gymnastics Olympians, because they don't hit their peak years until they're a fair bit older than women gymnasts are.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:28 PM on August 4, 2016 [5 favorites]


Couldn't we solve this and other problems by requiring that female athletes be coached by women?

Solve? No. I's not like women don't sexually abuse/harass women.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:31 PM on August 4, 2016 [12 favorites]


Couldn't we solve this and other problems by requiring that female athletes be coached by women?
So here's the thing. The article isn't about the problem of sexual abuse in gymnastics. The article is about the problem of the sport's national governing body refusing to act appropriately on allegations of sexual abuse, allowing abusers to continue abusing. I don't think you can ever entirely prevent sexual abuse, but you certainly can stop institutions from covering it up and facilitating further abuse.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:34 PM on August 4, 2016 [42 favorites]


Olympic Women's Gymnastics is one of the sports I have the biggest love-hate relationships with. Due to the particular demands of the sport it's one of the few sports where an immature body is preferred to an mature one. You sometimes have some female vault specialists that can hang on for an extended period of time but for the most part you are one and done as a top Olympic talent and even then you basically have to peak during the right time or else the next young phenom will pass you on your downward slide towards adulthood. Female gymnasts being able to compete at two successive olympics are basically unheard of anymore (Shannon Miller was the last one with a credible shot and even then there was a decline).

Combined with the near abusive training regime the general requirement to relocate to where a top coach is located and the extreme level of control over your life by coaches and it sets up a bad system where back actors can do some horrific things with more or less complicit officials.

And this is in the US where there is potentially some level of parental supervision. I can only imagine what would happen in countries were being sent to some sports academy is the norm.

Honestly I wouldn't mind restructuring the basics of the sport to favor older athletes. It's clear minimum age limits are going to be abused by some countries so I think the only way to really change the sport for the better is to change the fundamentals like the various apparatus so that pre-pubescent girls aren't the ideal athletes.
posted by vuron at 12:36 PM on August 4, 2016 [17 favorites]


The real takeaway from all of these stories is that this is everywhere normal in youth sports.
posted by j_curiouser at 12:36 PM on August 4, 2016


Female gymnasts being able to compete at two successive olympics are basically unheard of anymore (Shannon Miller was the last one with a credible shot and even then there was a decline).
There are actually two repeat Olympians on this year's US women's gymnastics team: Ally Raisman and Gabby Douglas. Raisman is 22, which is practically geriatric in women's gymnastics terms.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:41 PM on August 4, 2016 [7 favorites]


Normal in youth sports, and churches, and schools, and scouts, and homes; anywhere there are kids, there are likely to be sexual molestation cases.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 12:50 PM on August 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


Yes there are always going to be molestation cases where there are children but creating a culture where a kid's hopes and dreams are pretty much linked to a small number of elite coaches and your ability to succeed means staying in their good graces and that creates an environment where molestation can thrive because of the power of a select few to coerce youths.

That's why outside entities are critical for making sure that abuse doesn't happen or if it does it's quickly rooted out but it seems like USA Gymnastics definitely fell down on their responsibilities.
posted by vuron at 12:54 PM on August 4, 2016 [15 favorites]


a pretty half-baked idea (i.e. I'm ignorant) but...is there a public health framing that is better than a criminal law framing that might support studies from a mental health POV to get facts about prevalence in differing environments?

I hear assertions like "...youth sports, and churches, and schools, and scouts, and homes; anywhere there are kids" and I wonder...

my (limited) experience is that (just like #gunfail on Kos) badjocks never seemed to be short of new material.
posted by j_curiouser at 1:03 PM on August 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


A total ban on minors competing above the state level

We've tried that. All it did was cause some people *cough China cough* to lie about it at the Olympics.
posted by Melismata at 1:04 PM on August 4, 2016 [5 favorites]


I hear assertions like "...youth sports, and churches, and schools, and scouts, and homes; anywhere there are kids" and I wonder...

You wonder what? I could go dig up a citation for all of those, but why? The Catholic Church's legacy is no secret, stories of sex abuse by teachers at school are in the news pretty regularly and we've discussed some of the ones involving elite private schools here, the Boy Scouts story is, I think, fairly well known, and we also know that most child abuse happens at home. Calling it a "badjocks" problem obscures that it's much broader than that, in favor of blaming something that Metafilter already disfavors for other reasons (sports, especially youth sports).

There does need to be a conversation about how the special problems of sports, especially high level youth sports, which definitely do exist. Placing very young children into situations where they're under a great deal of pressure to perform for adults with whom they are in close physical contact day in and day out has all kinds of obvious risks. There also needs to be a conversation about USA Gymnastics specifically who seem to have failed in their duty to protect these children. That failure needs to be public and the organization should be held accountable.

I have a new daughter; she's four weeks old today. What kind of activities she participates in and what kind of relationship she has with adults in the world is something I'm thinking about, along with thinking about how to protect her as much as possible from harm while navigating the world is going to be hard. Thinking of those problems of as problems of "youth sports," is both wrong and not an effective way of addressing that problem.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 1:25 PM on August 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


//A total ban on minors competing above the state level (including comparing performances via video or whatever). //

So no national spelling bee, no 4H Nationals, no academic national competitions of any kind?

The fact that they are competing is not the issue. My daughter won multiple national championships in 4H, and that helped her get an almost full-ride scholarship to college, not to mention gave her a lot of great experiences traveling around in the summer with her teammates to regional and national events. There are thousands and thousands of kids just like her having great experiences in thousands of national competitions. I'll bet most of the gymnasts have a pretty great time too.

With Olympic level woman gymnasts we are talking about 50 to 100 woman, if that? Not that they deserve any worse experience than anybody else, but eliminating all national level competition because the US Gymnastics Assoc. screwed up is pretty much the definition of overkill.
posted by COD at 1:36 PM on August 4, 2016 [6 favorites]


Calling it a "badjocks" problem obscures that it's much broader than that, in favor of blaming something that Metafilter already disfavors for other reasons (sports, especially youth sports).

No one is doing that, and the idea that anyone is trying to frame it that way smacks of an #allkidsmatter attempt to deflect a single story about very specific problems in one particular sport.
posted by Etrigan at 1:37 PM on August 4, 2016


No one is doing that, and the idea that anyone is trying to frame it that way smacks of an #allkidsmatter attempt to deflect a single story about very specific problems in one particular sport.

That was not my intention at all. I thought I spelled out that I think there are specific problems in sports and specific problems in USA Gymnastics (based on the article), apologies if that wasn't clear.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 1:43 PM on August 4, 2016


I'm trying to imagine a world where X number of women rn.y degree crippled for life with PTSD from kind of childhood sex abuse that's wired into our society on so many levels and the fact but I don't even know what that looks like is freaking killing me here.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:52 PM on August 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


My sport (fencing) in the last few years went through the USOC-mandated SafeSport process, which mandates good practice, reporting requirements, certification, training, and accountability, and it was incredibly painful for a lot of people. As the article says, "concern about potential damage to a coach’s reputation if an allegation proved to be false" is generally the biggest fear. In addition, fencing involves regular one-to-one coach-to-student lessons (because it is a combat sport and is carried out between two people), and many coaches seemed horrified at the idea that they had to ensure a parent or responsible adult was present if they gave private lessons to a student under 18. It seems to have become more accepted these days, but it took quite a while. The culture of the sport has a long history and rests on an assumption of trust.

But as a teacher, it seemed odd to me that people in fencing were getting so upset. See, I was already used to getting FBI clearance, leaving my door open, never working with a kid alone, never giving a kid a ride in my car, being a required reporter, and all the other requirements of being someone who works with underage people.

That said, as the faculty contact for some years for allegations of harassment between adults, I am also always astounded at what people can get up to, even people you would swear were honorable human beings.
posted by Peach at 1:53 PM on August 4, 2016 [14 favorites]


There are organizations that engage with children - sporting and otherwise - that use internal controls and accountability and acknowledgement that both the problem and the controls exist (maybe the most important part, this acknowledgement?), and it works pretty well.

Probably part of the reason it works pretty well is that the organization actively doesn't want to be shitty in the first place, though. Gymnastics (and all that cheerleading/dance peripheral stuff) has been designed from the ground up by predators and profiteers for predators and profiteers. Nobody's doing it because it's good for girls (because it's demonstrably, emotionally and physically and developmentally, not. No 16-year-old should have destroyed knees or necks unless it's the result of disease or an unavoidable accident, institutionalized amenorrhea is not healthy, concussions ruin lives), and both the parents and the operators of these mills need to be held accountable for the damage done before either side is going to be incentivized to demand and provide those controls.

Obviously gymnastics isn't the only place this is happening, but it is one of the few remaining sports in which there is still a strong culture of handing over your child to a coach to be trained alone outside your supervision and control - even for students who aren't 1% Olympic-bound spectacularly promising, though coaches hard-sell that shit so they have access to more girls and money - at a young age. Predators are drawn to it for this reason. Parents who are willing to participate in the system anyway ought to treat everyone involved as if they are a predator from the jump and take appropriate precautions, and failure to do so should be legally treated as deliberate negligence.

At the end of the day, we don't *need* competitive gymnastics or any other sport. We do need unmolested kids.
posted by Lyn Never at 1:56 PM on August 4, 2016 [33 favorites]


I've started looking through some of these pieces, and so far I have a few unanswered questions that do somewhat make a difference in understanding the nature of the problem and how best to address it.

(1) it seems that the surface problem is the lack of response from the umbrella organization for the sport, but it's not clear to me that the coaches in question are all top/elite coaches. One of the named coaches is described as an Olympic-level coach, but I It seems plausible to me, indeed, that if anything problems with sexual abuse would be more prevalent/likely to go undetected at the non-elite/fringes of a sport that encompasses, according to the report, more than a hundred thousand young athletes working at more than 3,000 gyms, and where apparently if a coach gets a bad reputation at one gym it's relatively easy to just pick up and move elsewhere. So I think responses that target national/world level athletes like raising the age for Olympians (which, as noted, has already been done, and which also, at what point do you say even 16 is too young for Olympic female gymnasts but 15-year-old swimmers are A-OK?) or reducing the pressure to send teenagers across the country to work with elite coaches is not going to do anything to protect young athletes at their local gyms who are only competing at the local/state level anyhow.
(2) As others have pointed out, there is the potential for this kind of problem in any sort of sports or social environment where young people are in contact with adult coaches. That it happened is horrible and reprehensible. That the organization failed to act on reports is horrible and reprehensible and certainly policies need to be changed there. But is there a problem with the sport of gymnastics per se that merits gymnastics-specific changes? Compared to, say, swimming or figure skating or baseball/softball.
posted by drlith at 2:02 PM on August 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


I have a twelve year-old boy who spends 20 hours per week in the gym with his coach for competitive gymnastics. The rules are clear to everyone; there is always another adult present. Always.

I'm personally not really into any sports, but my son doesn't say that he does gymnastics. He says he *is* a gymnast. That's why I support him, he loves it. Not because I'm pushing for him to win.
posted by mdoar at 2:07 PM on August 4, 2016 [14 favorites]


Arguably, swimming is good for you. In fact, I would say, having known some (non competitive) swimmers well into their 90s, that you can swim forever.

Gymnastics, not so much. I was a competitive gymnast. Back during the days when uneven parallel bars were a very slammy-bouncy- painful apparatus. The amount of damage to my spine and hips and feet and shoulders that I did before I was old enough for my period to have started is astonishing.

No sport that requires children to sacrifice their social lives, their mental agency, and their bodies to permanent damage is a good sport. Sport is something that should be good for you, not something that consumes the athlete for the pleasure of the viewing audience. The girls aren't the ones who are making business decisions to make the girl's sport younger and younger and smaller and smaller. Men's gymnastics is an entirely different field of sport.

That said; USA Gymnastics protecting pedophiles and molesters is no surprise to anyone who has looked into the cold dead eyes of Steve Penny. It's certainly no surprise to competitive gymnasts.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 2:20 PM on August 4, 2016 [16 favorites]


I don't think that's true of young future Olympians in general, but it is true of young future Olympian women's gymnasts.

I think there's a lot of special snow-flaking going on here that is exactly that. Hockey players start at 4 or 5. So do figure skaters. So do football/soccer players. Some sports do prefer to develop athletes later, after puberty, but many, including gymnastics start very early.

Gymnastics may have a particular structural problem with control of its coaches. I think people who follow the sport at all have seen many examples of behaviours and patterns that raise eyebrows over the years.

But let's not pretend that gymnastics stands alone a different kind of sport, or even activity, when compared with anything else. There are many others who train as intensively and as hard as female gymnasts, from as young an age. Perhaps even gymnastics could adapt practices from those other sports (or pursuits like dance) which have a better handle on curbing abuses, sexual or otherwise---harsh and emotionally abusive coaching has to be part of the culture change too.
posted by bonehead at 2:24 PM on August 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


So what is it about women's gymnastics that makes it so difficult for athletes to continue in it past age 18 or 20 or whatever?
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:28 PM on August 4, 2016


gravity, physics and the size of the apparatus. Prepubescent girls have a much, much different body density and centre of gravity than those who've grown and developed.
posted by lonefrontranger at 2:35 PM on August 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


... I mean we see this all the time in bike racing, there will be a talented fourteen year old who can blow everyone away at certain hillclimb events that favor very high power/weight ratios, but they'll completely fall down in events that require more flat out muscular power (so, criteriums or time trialling into a stiff crosswind, say).
posted by lonefrontranger at 2:37 PM on August 4, 2016


I'd guess three things -
1) Kids are much more flexible than adults, and women's gymnastics emphasizes flexibility more than men's.
2) The strength to bodyweight ratio -- The men have more of an advantage to waiting thru puberty since they can build bigger muscles. For the women that advantage isn't as great because they don't get the testosterone boost for muscle building, and the women are more likely to gain fat weight in puberty rather than muscle weight. So the proportional strength-to-bodyweight advantage goes to preteen or teen girls, but to post-teen men.
3) Extra height is also a disadvantage, I think. Compare gymnasts to ballerinas - in ballet, you need to be taller than x to have a prayer of being an elite competitor. The opposite is true for gymnastics.
posted by LobsterMitten at 2:39 PM on August 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yeah I want to be clear I love sports in general and spend way too much time thinking about them in general.

However when it becomes clear that a sport is asking too much of the athletes such as football with traumatic brain injuries from repeated concussions and sports where a large number of young athletes are subject to potential harm and abuse that I definitely think the governing bodies of the sport need to step in.

Gymnastics has been a very troubled sport for a long time but it's also one of the marquee sports of the Olympics so even though there are definite reasons why it should be completely overhauled the IOC and USOC and the Gymnastic Federations keep avoiding making necessary changes.
posted by vuron at 2:54 PM on August 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


Couldn't we solve this and other problems by requiring that female athletes be coached by women?

Though I don't have the stats I have no doubt that males sexually abuse minors more than women do but it's hardly limited to female athletes. There are many stories of male athletes being abused by their coaches as well. I'm all for the basic assumption that sexual and other types of abuse are a danger when you have people with authority over very young people but that assumption has to drive policies to prevent it and the people in the organization have to have the principles to follow those policies. The history of the human race and positions of power has been and continues to be, to say the least, horrible. We have to fully acknowledge that and build interaction with that in mind.

Normal in youth sports, and churches, and schools, and scouts, and homes; anywhere there are kids, there are likely to be sexual molestation cases.

I saw physical and sexual abuse first hand in scouts on a 3 day camping trip. I was fortunate to be only an observer but as a child was terrified, particularly at night with the shit going on. I managed to get a call to my parents who picked me up early. I told them why I pissed my pants because I was to scared to leave the tent and why I was never going back again. They supported me and raised a fuss but I'm not sure anything happened.
posted by juiceCake at 3:08 PM on August 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


But let's not pretend that gymnastics stands alone a different kind of sport, or even activity, when compared with anything else.

I recommend anyone who feels this way read Little Girls in Pretty Boxes.
posted by sallybrown at 3:46 PM on August 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


You wonder what?

I wonder if a scientifically rigorous survey executed by independent epidemiologists would either verify or refute assertions and prejudices of myself and others regarding prevalence of minor sexual abuse in a cross section of youth organizations like sports, churches, and scouts. Specifically, I wonder if a public health framing suggests a more insightful approach to the information than a forensic model.

Further, what kind of popularly reported incidence would make this interesting to academic investigators.

I didn't make up badjocks, it's been a thing for some time. #gunfail is pretty new.
posted by j_curiouser at 3:48 PM on August 4, 2016


Though I don't have the stats I have no doubt that males sexually abuse minors more than women do

Why do you have no doubt in this? I can tell you from personal experience that women can be just as abusive as men, and it's a lot more common than you may think. This mindset is part of why abuse by women is ignored in society, especially when it involves boys.

My own parade of abusers takes a pretty even 50/50 split between men and women, and the genders really made no difference in the effects. Women can be just as horrible as men, and all it takes is a position of power and a vulnerable person for it happen.

If men do it more than women, the only probable reason is that more men are in power than women right now; the more women gain positions of power, the more you'll find them abusing kids, just the same as men. The common element men and women share is that they're human beings, and it's as human beings they abuse others.
posted by gehenna_lion at 3:51 PM on August 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


Also, the problem with saying "let's stop X group from doing this but not Y group" is that it creates loopholes, and once you start opening loopholes, here come the exploiters. There are many ways for an uncontrolled adult to ruin a child's life.
posted by Lyn Never at 4:19 PM on August 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Female gymnasts being able to compete at two successive olympics are basically unheard of anymore (Shannon Miller was the last one with a credible shot and even then there was a decline).

Two out of five member of the 2016 US women's Olympic team were on the 2012 team: Aly Raisman and Gabby Douglas. The average age of women gymnasts at this year's Olympics is 20.

I have a twelve year-old boy who spends 20 hours per week in the gym with his coach for competitive gymnastics. The rules are clear to everyone; there is always another adult present. Always.

I'm personally not really into any sports, but my son doesn't say that he does gymnastics. He says he *is* a gymnast. That's why I support him, he loves it. Not because I'm pushing for him to win.


My son who just turned 9 on Monday is in the gym 16 hours a week this summer, and it's not enough for him. He was really happy to move up to Level 6, which meant 4-hour practices instead of 3-hour practices, because a 3-hour practice "feels like it's about two seconds long."

I have a friend whose teenage son plays football. We were talking about how going into one of these sports isn't a rational pro-con decision. "Gymnasts gonna gym," is the upshot. And I think the drive a young person has to follow that athletic passion deserves respect, just as other passions and interests do.

(1) it seems that the surface problem is the lack of response from the umbrella organization for the sport, but it's not clear to me that the coaches in question are all top/elite coaches.


They are definitely not all elites. A former coach at one of the two gyms in our town was arrested recently. The abuse didn't happen at the gym where he worked, but he worked at the one that is explicitly and deliberately low-pressure and less-focused on getting kids to higher levels/regionals and nationals.

There's also a really blurry line between "elite" and "not elite" in coaching. There are some gyms that turn out more than their fair share of elites and Olympians, but a lot of college and elite gymnasts come from regular old gyms. The gym where my son is on the team is the home of the 2011 world champion and a member of the 2012 "Fierce Five" Olympic team. Her trip to the top of the sport carried her coach along with her, but he's not still an Olympic coach now that she's off in college, and he's unlikely to take another gymnast to the Olympics. On any given day, at the very same time, in the very same gym, you can see toddlers in their first tumbling class, all levels of recreational and competitive gymnasts, and the occasional Olympian—US Olympic team member Danell Leyva, who is on the team this year and won the bronze in the all-around in 2012, still trains at the gym his stepfather runs in Miami. He posts training videos sometimes, and it's like: there's Olympian Danell Leyva! And in the background you can see a class of 7-year-old boys all trying to learn to hold a handstand.

At the end of the day, we don't *need* competitive gymnastics or any other sport. We do need unmolested kids.

It is so easy to dismiss sports when you're not an athlete. I don't think I'd have batted an eye at a statement like this until my fourth child entered our lives. Taking away gymnastics from him would be akin to taking away books and writing materials for me, or Lego from my 15-year-old who sees himself as an artist whose medium is Lego.

And I don't know why it's this way, but substituting another sport would not be easy. The Tiny Tornado has tried soccer, basketball, t-ball, tap dance, hip-hop dance, and more. And he has enjoyed them all. But none of them light him up the way gymnastics does.

Gymnastics (and all that cheerleading/dance peripheral stuff) has been designed from the ground up by predators and profiteers for predators and profiteers. Nobody's doing it because it's good for girls (because it's demonstrably, emotionally and physically and developmentally, not. No 16-year-old should have destroyed knees or necks unless it's the result of disease or an unavoidable accident, institutionalized amenorrhea is not healthy, concussions ruin lives), and both the parents and the operators of these mills need to be held accountable for the damage done before either side is going to be incentivized to demand and provide those controls.

You have really strong feelings about this, I can see. I think it's worth noting that these kinds of arguments against gymnastics are in some ways addressing a past version of the sport. Mary Lou Retton had both her hips replaced in her 40s, and I saw her recently talking about how different it is now. She said something like, "I could do 78 reps of a vault in one day, onto the regular floor, no mats." Now mats, foam pits, and so on are widely used. In competition, it is even possible for a coach to, say, move a mat onto one corner of the floor so that a gymnast will have that extra padding on the landing of a certain tumbling pass, and then pull it away after the gymnast has landed. "Roll-out" landings, in which the gymnast lands head-first out of a tumbling element, have been illegal in women's gymnastics for a long time, and were removed from the men's gymnastics code of points for the new quad beginning in this upcoming competition year. And so on.

That said, the culture of gymnastics is very toxic in many ways. Problems with coaches who are unprofessional and ego-mad abound; at my son's gym, for instance, I'm currently in a ridiculous brouhaha with the owner because I dared to ask some questions about some booster club practices that violate IRS guidelines for non-profits.

That said! This is an issue I've been concerned about for awhile, as a number of coaches have been arrested in the past year. There's been concern about how slow USA Gymnastics has been to get this information out there. They maintain a list of "permanently banned members" which you can check to see if a certain coach or staffer has been found in violation of the rules, but it's so slow to be updated that there are too many people who've actually been arrested or convinced still coaching. Just this week, the people who do the Gymcastic podcast—a very influential source of information in the world of gymnastics fans--decided to deal with the situation by starting a crowd-sourced database of reports of sexual abuse. Basically, they've been calling for USA Gymnastics to up its game for ages, and finally decided that if USAG wasn't going to do it, gymfans were just going to have to do it themselves.

This has been a concern of mine and other people's for awhile, but I hadn't been aware of the specific information about filing reports away, and pretending to believe that USAG wasn't required to report to law enforcement. Of course, it's not surprising. In this article, there's the usual reversal in terms of who is vulnerable and who is powerful: gymnastics coaches, who are grown men and women, are vulnerable, while children who report abuse are not. If we can't be sure about abuse happening, we'd rather err on the side of possibly letting children continue to be preyed upon than risk tarnishing a coach's reputation. Same old bullshit.

A few months ago I read an article, which I can't find, by a former gymnast who learned that her coach had abused other girls during the time she was at his gym. She described the culture of the gym as dividing the girls into three categories: the ones who clearly "had it" and were destined for college or elite gymnastics; the ones who clearly didn't, and were there for recreational purposes; and the girls who were on the bubble, who were good enough that maybe with a little hard work and extra help they could get into that top tier. Those were the girls the coach preyed on: they were anxious about their position in a way that the girls solidly above and below them weren't; they were in a position where needing extra help from a coach was plausible; and they were flattered to get the kind of extra attention that usually only the "contenders" got. For whatever reason, I found this really useful as something to be aware of in terms of keeping an eye out for skeevy behavior or whatever.

I recommend anyone who feels this way read Little Girls in Pretty Boxes.

I think if you're going to read Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, which is over 20 years old now, you also consider reading the newly-released The End of the Perfect 10, by Dvora Myers. It focuses on the changes in the judging system from the scale where 10 was the highest, to the open-ended scoring system used today, in which each skill is assigned a value based on its difficulty, and a gymnast is scored based on the value of the 10 highest skills in a routine, plus an execution score in which flaws are deducted from a starting value of 10. This has driven the women as well as the men to more and more difficult routines. If you look at the current US men's team, they have biceps like whoa. 20 years ago, male gymnasts had a much less bulky build. On the women's side, strength has also gained ground over being lightweight and tiny. The 2016 team is here. Here are the Romanian women on the gold medal podium in 1984.

Gymnastics has changed a lot in the last 25 years. What you so sneeringly dismiss doesn't exist in the same way it used to. Not that there aren't still problems inherent in the sport, especially for girls. I read a recent Jordyn Weiber interview in which she talked about having to make these huge life decisions at 15 and 16, and how ridiculous that was (in particular, she sometimes regrets "going pro," capitalizing on her Olympic fame to get endorsements, because it left her ineligible to compete in the NCAA). Women do still peak in their mid-to-late teens, meaning there is pressure on them from an early age, and gymnasts do still spend most of their non-school time in the gym, year-round—it's a sport that expects a commitment much earlier than other sports do, in part because it is very difficult for a gymnast to stay in peak shape. Skills degrade very rapidly if not practiced constantly. Most women gymnasts do still have short elite careers, and for the most part, have a chance at a single Olympics. I recently learned that it's not actually considered a good sign for a woman/girl gymnast to win junior national championships as a level 9 or level 10 (the highest competitive levels below elite) because it can mean she's peaked too early and won't be at the top of her game for the Olympics (someone also mentioned this up-thread).

ALL OF THAT SAID!

I am so tired of hearing this same story over and over again, from one institution after another: the Catholic church, the Horace Mann school, New England boarding schools. Now USA Gymnastics. I feel like journalists can just create a template into which names of people and institutions can be inserted, the story is so familiar and plays out so much the same every time.

I have a friend who is a former competitive swimmer and long-time rowing coach, and he says these same problems are rife in swimming in particular. He told me just the other day, "If you get the leave hint of skeeviness, especially if a coach seems especially skeevy around the girls, you've got to take that really seriously."

Maybe the repetition of this story over and over and over will someday reach critical mass and lead to a concerted effort to figure out how to make the necessary changes at the level of the wider culture within which this stuff is endemic. I don't know how to make that happen.
posted by not that girl at 4:53 PM on August 4, 2016 [32 favorites]


I have a kid who had the ability to do really well at gymnastics and the coach was pushing for more hours than the 16 he did a week, and we pulled him out because he just wasn't that interested. He had the talent but not the drive. His baby sister is now at the same gym when I said I wouldn't put a girl into gym due to the weight pressure, but the newer crop of gymnasts and a friend enrolling her kid in a class that was fun changed my mind. Now I have a four year old who asks to watch gymnastics videos on YouTube and is desperate to level up to the big girl class with "real" cartwheels and the bars. She is in her leotard now on a picnic mat coaching her baby doll through a gymnastics exercise.

The teacher/coach resistance to supervision is really strange and telling. I remember a conversation with a senior teacher I respect, and his insistence that students, especially young women, could and did make threats of sexual harassment or abuse against (mainly male) teachers for grades and to get out of bad behavior. His belief was that teachers should not be alone with students and have a lot of documentation and clear boundaries, which I agree with but not the reasoning behind!
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:52 PM on August 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


There is a massive, massive, like, Grand Canyon-scale gap between "play[ing] sports as kids" and the total dedication to it that make an athlete competitive at an Olympic level. SImone Biles started training with a coach at eight. She was competing at a world level at sixteen. She was homeschooled for pretty much her entire adolescence because of the demands of the sport.

And I have no fewer than 6 former classmates or friends who did the same and I also competed at the national level as a child in one sport and could have in another. And it was fine and most of us still do the sport we liked then and two even went to the Olympics! It's not like they keep you in a pod. Everyone still had a normal childhood for the most part, or better than normal in terms of the amount of time spent with parents as a child and the free prep schools or college.

Personally, I would not be thrilled to have my daughter that involved in any sport that prizes being small, sparkly and pretty but if they had talent and really wanted it I'd support it and I'd support them. Kids learn a lot from that.
posted by fshgrl at 8:10 PM on August 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


There was a badly written article on NYMag the other day (which I can't find) that didn't really fit with the headline, which was something like "Is Gymnastics Just As Ethically Bad As Football?" Sadly, the article didn't really get into that and then devolved into giant pictures of gymnasts...but yeah, it is ethically horrible the way that the sport has turned into one in which only tiny 12-16-year-old girls under 5 feet tall with an eating disorder can be perfect enough at. That is just ridiculous. Literally the only way to solve that would be to somehow completely and utterly change the sport so that adult women could thrive at it....but that won't happen.

Plus here's this lovely culture where small girls are taught from an early age to do anything Coach says and to suck up to people in power in order to get anywhere, and if you say anything you become a troublemaker and tank your career.

I just finished reading this YA fiction book, "Tumbling," and hoooooo boy. Even though "weigh-ins" don't happen any more, there's still one anorexic character, one girl who got totally screwed out of going to the Olympics due to age restrictions and her birthday being on January 2 (and we're told that the lone coach who decides who gets to go to the Olympics hates this girl because she's spent the last 4 years of her life NOT attending every gym camp and injuring herself so she can try again at age 20), being in a culture where it's rare for anyone to go to high school or date (and preferably you shouldn't do either), how weird it is to have buffets out that the girls can't eat at....
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:11 PM on August 4, 2016


Gymcastic is doing a podcast everyday during the Olympic gymnastic season, starting with men's podium training on Wednesday. Yesterday's podcast addresses this article, for those who might be interested.

There was a badly written article on NYMag the other day (which I can't find) that didn't really fit with the headline, which was something like "Is Gymnastics Just As Ethically Bad As Football?" Sadly, the article didn't really get into that and then devolved into giant pictures of gymnasts...but yeah, it is ethically horrible the way that the sport has turned into one in which only tiny 12-16-year-old girls under 5 feet tall with an eating disorder can be perfect enough at.

The average age of gymnasts going to Olympics this year is 20. 16 is the minimum age at which a female gymnast is eligible for the Olympics. I don't mean to beat a dead horse, and I don't mean to suggest that women's gymnastics is above reproach. But this kind of dismissive criticism is a straw man argument. I'd much rather see thoughtful criticism of gymnastics as it exists than these kind of repeated extreme judgments of a version of the sport that is, at the very least, out-of-date.
posted by not that girl at 12:12 AM on August 5, 2016 [7 favorites]


Sports should be a fun way to exercise throughout much of your life. Ain't much point if you abandon it after a certain age.

I'd favor dropping gymnastics per se from national competitive sports, given that you cannot carry it into adulthood. I suppose gymnastics might show additional benefits in adulthood, like by studying how much gymnasts adopt other sports or whatever, but just drop it unless such concrete evidence appears and seems correct.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:30 AM on August 5, 2016


Hang on - you can and do compete in gymnastics as young adults. The whole only young teenage girls age thing is changing quite quickly for the sport as the way they judge is changing. Men's gymnastics has had a longer age grade favouring the 20s period (like most sports) and now so is women's gymnastics.

And gymnastics has been one of the few sports where women athletes tend to have higher name recognition and earning power than men. Which is a weird quirk seeing it is historically a sport from men's military training, but ask people to name a famous male gymnast and they'll blank.

At the gym where my kids trained/train, there were the coaches who were all ex-gymnasts, and then there were a couple of adult classes for people who had done gymnastics as kids and teens or wished they had and wanted to pick it up. People did adult gym to learn tumbling skills and as a more fun version of yoga it seemed. Most of the parents of gymnasts going there had done gym themselves and had good memories of their time.

I'm not wild about gymnastics but it is an extremely disciplined individual sport that encourages peer support, much like swimming. You learn to do amazingly cool things with your body like a freaking comic book character and you learn that with steady hard work, you can gain strength and flexibility and precision that is measurable. When my kid made a good landing or when he got through a routine on the horse properly - it meant something.

This though seems like a distraction from the original article which is that an organisation that profited from ignoring problems of abused minors was found to have ignored problems rather than tackled them - and whether that's structural to the organisation is about how the organisation is run and funded, not the sport itself. Because the same damn thing seems to happen with any organised sport involving young children.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 12:54 AM on August 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


It kills me that there exists a common thread among child abuse cases.


Were you referring to "male predators"? Because that's the biggest, fattest, rope-sized thread that runs through history and across the globe.
posted by Dressed to Kill at 6:13 AM on August 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


I think that the common thread that is relevant to this story is institutions that care more about protecting their own interests and the interests of powerful adults than they care about the safety of children. In that sense, it is like Penn State and the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal and the stuff at elite private schools and.... there are just so many examples that it's depressing as fuck to list them. I do have some qualms about the ethics of women's gymnastics, as a person who enjoys watching that sport, but I don't think that's the primary issue here. There was a similar scandal recently in USA Swimming. This shit is everywhere.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:23 AM on August 5, 2016 [5 favorites]


> Mary Lou Retton had both her hips replaced in her 40s

Just for the record, Mary Lou Retton had hip dysplasia. I could barely walk by age 40 because of hip dysplasia and I was only a casual athlete. My hips were repaired, not replaced, though I may need replacements eventually.

This is not to say that gymnastics is not very hard on the body. The retired competitive gymnasts I know all have nagging injuries and chronic pain. All of them say they would do it again.

The average age of competitive gymnasts at the world and Olympic level has gone up, but it doesn't change that gymnastics is still primarily a sport for kids. The majority of competitors in the Junior Olympic system (the sub-Olympic competition levels in the US) are tweens and teenagers. These kids are the life blood of any gym and usually the victims of predatory coaches.

USA Gymnastics has a hundred reasons why they're not responsible in any given situation, but folders full of complaints against individual coaches are hard to dismiss.
posted by swerve at 8:57 AM on August 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


It kills me that there exists a common thread among child abuse cases.

Were you referring to "male predators"? Because that's the biggest, fattest, rope-sized thread that runs through history and across the globe.


You're misquoting me, but I don't mind because I agree with you so damned hard.

The fact that child abusers, and rapists, are so dominantly men seems like the third wire that no one will go near, or even acknowledge. I have to wonder when that will ever, ever be addressed. Certainly, until it is acknowledged and addressed, we will continue to mass-produce stories about child abuse in Institution X, and rape, well, across the globe.
posted by Dashy at 10:40 AM on August 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


I'm going to add that far too often, the protectors of the abusers are women.
posted by Peach at 12:54 PM on August 5, 2016


Just for the record, Mary Lou Retton had hip dysplasia. I could barely walk by age 40 because of hip dysplasia and I was only a casual athlete. My hips were repaired, not replaced, though I may need replacements eventually.

Yes, I was going to say that not only did she practice during a time when the sport was less careful about wear and tear on gymnasts' bodies, but she had this going on as well.

If people are interested, New Republic has an article about Dvora Myers' book that does a good job talking about the changes in the sport.
posted by not that girl at 2:10 PM on August 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


These kids are the life blood of any gym and usually the victims of predatory coaches.

Yes, and one criticism of the sport that is valid, I think, is that these gymnasts, who are overwhelmingly girls, are big cash cows for gyms, and you can certainly argue that gyms exploit these kids' fantasies and the glamour of girls' gymnastics. Certainly there's a sense that it will never be the gym telling your gymnast it's time for her to accept her limitations or move on. Even on the boys' team at our gym, there are a couple of boys who haven't advanced a level in two years—and they are at the lowest competitive level. I watch them and I think about how much money their parents are paying into the gym, and how many hours they're having to put in even as Level 4s, and think about how the coaches will never suggest that they try something else instead. This is something parents gossip about when we find ourselves waiting to pick up our kids etc.

Not every gym has a booster club, but where they exist, they are a system to transfer resources to the families of the most-talented gymnasts. For instance, at our club every gymnast on the competitive team is required to be part of the booster club, which comes to about $1500/year. In exchange, the booster club covers certain expenses. Not uniforms, which everybody needs (some booster clubs do cover these), but admissions to meets, and subsidies for travel on team trips. On the boys' side, there are so few of them that they all get to go to meets, all the way up to the state level. On the girls' side, though, spots at meets—especially out-of-town meets—are competitive, so many families pay into the booster club year after year while getting very little back from it.

More related to the issue of sexual abuse, it is a common experience among gymnastics parents that gym owners/head coaches are ego-driven, unprofessional, and unable to hear criticism. Our family has been considering moving our son to another gym, and I went to the Chalk Bucket—an online forum for gymnastics parents—to see what people had to say about their experiences changing gyms. The overwhelming consensus is that you have to be very cautious exploring another gym, because it's a small world, and if word gets back to your home gym that you visited another gym or went there for a tryout, it can cause a lot of trouble for your kid. Nearly every gym has a 30-day notice policy, meaning that you are on the hook for a months' worth of fees after giving notice you're leaving. A number of people said that they were so concerned about retaliation and bad treatment that, rather than give notice, they didn't say anything to the gym until after their gymast's final practice, that they preferred to simply eat the final month's fees (easily $400-500, plus booster club fees) rather than deal with the drama.

The owner of our gym has currently banned my son from practice because [long story redacted] [short version inserted] we tried to address some concerns we have about communication from the gym, and booster club practices. The owner's behavior has been volatile and verbally abusive, and it occurs to me that we may have ruined our kid's future at this gym because there is no way this guy is going to be reasonable about any of it. I have a meeting with him on Monday, and my strategy is basically to find the sweet spot between how much groveling he wants, and how much groveling I'm willing to do. [Though I had already planned to ask him about sexual abuse prevention even before this report came out, and I certainly will now.] From talking to other gym parents I understand that this is a widespread phenomenon. (If you're wondering why we don't just leave: the nearest other gyms with competitive boys' teams are at least an hour away. It may still happen, but it would be a hardship on our family. Our son prefers to stay at his current gym because he likes his teammates and coaches.)

It is pretty damn hard to imagine a report of sexual abuse being treated appropriately in this kind of context. If the parents are basically trained not to raise concerns because the gym management may retaliate against their child, then that is a big damper on disclosing or seeking help. If your gym is also, like ours, the only one in the state that has ever had a world champion/Olympic gold medalist, and you or your daughter are fantasizing about that, then that's added leverage.

On the Gymcastic podcast, they contrasted USA Gymnastics' policy with the USA Swimming policy, which is comprehensive and includes mandatory training for members. It's worth taking a look at, I think.
posted by not that girl at 2:47 PM on August 5, 2016 [8 favorites]


That's not necessarily a bad thing about the booster clubs though. Otherwise less well off but talented kids wouldn't get to compete. And the better your gym/ club does the better for everyone in terms of attracting talented coaches and college scouts etc
posted by fshgrl at 5:22 PM on August 5, 2016


A reporter for The Reveal has completed an hour long podcast episode on this topic: Reporter Tennessee Watson says she was sexually abused by her gymnastics coach when she was a kid in the 1980s. More than 25 years later, when she learned he still was coaching children, she called the police. Her inside account of the painful process of seeking justice in her own case exposes discrepancies in prosecutors’ responses to reports of child sexual abuse and spotlights a lack of accountability.
posted by crush-onastick at 11:48 AM on August 15, 2016


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