Tracing USA Gymnastics’ Journey from Lowdown to Olympic Domination

At the start of 2018, things were looking bad for USA Gymnastics.

The organization that oversees one of the country’s most popular Olympic sports was in a slump since a massive sexual abuse scandal. It was shut down by U.S. Olympic officials. Lawsuits piled up. Major sponsors, like AT&T and UnderArmour, fled.

And perhaps the biggest critics were former gymnasts themselves, who began to speak more openly about a problematic culture in gymnastics long overshadowed by years of Olympic success.

Six years later, the overhaul is significant. No American team is better positioned to succeed in Paris than the women’s gymnastics team. The five-member squad, led by 27-year-old Olympic veteran Simone Biles, is expected to win multiple gold medals, including in the team all-around.

“People were turning a blind eye to the abuse,” said Dominique Dawes, a member of the 1996 Olympic team that won the team all-around gold medal at the Atlanta Summer Games. “People were talking about the toxic culture, they were talking about the abuse. But I think people were just in awe of what we were able to accomplish.”

Today, the culture at USA Gymnastics has improved, Dawes and others said. A new organization oversees athlete safety, and competitors have more authority to raise concerns. Still, more progress may be needed before the turnaround is considered complete.

“The fact is, I think there will always be work to be done,” Dawes said.

Hitting rock bottom

In January 2018, Larry Nassar, the organization’s longtime team doctor, was sentenced to life in prison after hundreds of young female gymnasts came forward to say he used his position to sexually assault them.

The abuse scandal involved people other than Nassar, as the Indianapolis Star first reported in August 2016 during that summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Abuse victims said USA Gymnastics’ organizational culture was partly to blame for the abuse.

“Emotional abuse is rampant, as is physical abuse. Sexual abuse is a consequence of what happens when that culture prevails,” Jessica Howard, a rhythmic gymnast who competed with USA Gymnastics in the late 1990s and early 2000s, said in a 2017 interview with CBS.

This problematic culture permeated the organization for years, former gymnasts said. For decades, USA Gymnastics’ women’s program was led by legendary coach Marta Karolyi, who guided teams to repeated gold medals even as gymnasts left feeling like the success had come at the cost of their lives.

The Karolyi regime was characterized by grueling training schedules and pressure to perform despite serious injuries. Under the guise of protecting the gymnasts’ focus on the Olympics, emotions were tightly controlled, especially during competitions, Dawes said. “We weren’t allowed to look at our competitors. We were even asked to look away. We never encouraged each other,” she said.

Gymnasts were forced to attend training camps at the Karolyi Gymnastics facility in Texas, where most of Nassar’s abuse took place, according to victims. Parents were not allowed to accompany their daughters. Access to food was strictly monitored, leading some of the participants, including Biles, to sneak into the cafeteria at night to eat.

“Under Marta, girls were systematically isolated from their parents, siblings, real doctors and their own coaches, leaving them vulnerable to daily abuse and starvation,” former gymnast Rachael Denhollander, the first woman to publicly accuse Nassar, said in a post this month on the social media site X.

Karolyi retired just after the 2016 Olympics, just before the allegations against Nassar became widely publicized. She has long denied any knowledge of the abuse.

A legal settlement in 2021 helped bring closure, as did the hiring of former gymnasts in leadership positions.

In 2021, USA Gymnastics settled a lawsuit filed by victims of Nassar’s abuse by agreeing to pay $380 million. The organization also agreed to give a board seat to a representative of the abuse survivors.

“The survivors gave up money to get this,” the victims’ lead attorney, John Manly, told NPR after the settlement in 2021. “They want to fundamentally change the culture that money and medals are the only thing that matters, because that way they can protect other women, girls, boys and men from what’s happening to them.”

Two of the major changes at USA Gymnastics have been decentralizing control of the women’s program and involving more former gymnasts in its administration.

In 2022, the team hired three officials to fill a leadership role previously held for years by Marta Karolyi. Two of those three new officials — technical lead Chellsie Memmel and strategy lead Alicia Sacramone Quinn — are former Olympic gymnasts.

At a news conference last month ahead of the Olympic trials in Minneapolis, Quinn openly acknowledged that gymnasts like her were once discouraged from raising health concerns.

“I know I wouldn’t have said, ‘Hey, I don’t think I can do 45 beam routines today,'” Quinn said.

She and other officials have worked to improve communication between USA Gymnastics and its athletes, she said.

“I think it’s good for us because we know where they’re at. And I think it’s great for them because we’re going to respect their knowledge of their own bodies and what they’re capable of doing,” Quinn said.

Age is a factor, and Biles, at 27, is leading by example

Quinn and other gymnastics officials praised the example set by team leader Biles, who at 27 is older than most elite gymnasts.

She’s regularly seen at competitions cheering on competitors and comforting teammates who have been injured. And her years of experience — including withdrawing from several events at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics due to concerns about her mental health — have allowed her to speak more candidly with coaches and USA Gymnastics, officials and Biles herself.

“I think athletes are a little more in tune with their bodies now and trusting their instincts. We’re taking mental health a little more seriously,” Biles said after the trials.

Female gymnasts are among the youngest Olympians. The youngest competitor on the nearly 600-strong U.S. team is gymnast Hezly Rivera, who just turned 16 last month.

There are some promising signs of a turnaround.

When the Olympic trials wrapped up in Minneapolis earlier this month, one of the big stories was the return of gymnast Suni Lee from a debilitating kidney disease that sidelined her from competition last year.

When asked who helped her most in her comeback, Lee named the USA Gymnastics team doctor.

“She was constantly checking in on me, making sure I was doing okay,” Lee said. “She was basically reminding me of my worth and just telling me to never give up, because she knew I would be very disappointed in myself if I gave up on this dream.”