Consider This from NPR - USA Gymnastics made a miraculous comeback — but is it actually safer for Olympians?

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

In 2017, the Larry Nassar scandal rocked the Olympic community. Hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse against the former USA Gymnastics doctor underscored how vulnerable athletes are — particularly when they're minors. That year, Congress and the U.S. Olympic Committee had a solution.The U.S. Center for SafeSport was founded to investigate and respond to allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct. The goal was for predators like Larry Nassar to never harm young athletes again.Now, seven years later, SafeSport is facing scrutiny of its own — over whether it's made good on that promise.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The best gymnasts in the nation ran, flipped, twirled, and twisted their way onto Team USA. Now they're Paris-bound and aiming to bring home the gold. With all the hype around USA Gymnastics heading into the 2024 Summer Olympics, it's easy to forget for a moment where the organization stood just six years ago. Nobody was even concerned whether or not we were being sexually abused. I was not protected, and neither were my teammates. Larry Nassar is accountable. USA Gymnastics is accountable. That's former Olympic gymnast Jordan Weber speaking at the trial of longtime USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. In 2018, he was sentenced to life in prison after hundreds of young gymnasts came

forward to say he had used his position to sexually assault them. Then lawsuits against the organization multiplied, major sponsors fled, and USA Gymnastics was on the brink of being shut down by U.S. Olympic officials. Former gymnasts say the culture inside the organization had been problematic for decades, from grueling training schedules to pressure to perform through serious injuries. What we experienced in the 90s, it was evident that it was not a healthy culture. People talked about the toxic culture. They talked about the abuses. But I think people were just in awe of what we were able to accomplish because they're like, but they made history. They're amazing. But people turned a blind eye to the abuse. That's former Olympic gymnast Dominique Dawes speaking with NPR at the Olympic trials in Minneapolis last month.

Dawes was part of the USA Gymnastics team that won the all-around gold medal at the 1996 Summer Olympics. In 2021, USA Gymnastics began to turn a corner. The organization settled a lawsuit from the victims of Nassar's abuse, agreeing to pay out $380 million. It assigned a board seat to one of the survivors. And in 2022, it hired three new officials to run the organization, including Alicia Sacrimony Quinn, a former Olympic gymnast who is now the program's strategic lead. Quinn told NPR that nowadays communication between USA Gymnastics and athletes is a lot more open than when she was a gymnast in the program. I think it's nice for us because we know where they stand, 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, and we can adjust the program so everybody's on the same page. But for Dominique Dawes, the other former Olympian you heard a moment ago, these changes are perhaps just a start. I think there's a perception that there's a culture change. For this generation that's on the floor competing, I think it's healthier for them. But we don't know what's happening with the younger generations because they still don't have a voice. There's another big change that came after the Larry Nassar scandal, and that's the opening of the U.S. Center for Safe Sport. The organization created a formal process to investigate

and respond to allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct in the Olympic community. But Safe Sport says reports of such behavior have grown rapidly, and it doesn't have the resources to keep up. Consider this. USA Gymnastics made a miraculous comeback. But has it actually gotten safer to be a young Olympic athlete? From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Consider This from NPR. In 2017, the Larry Nassar scandal rocked the Olympic community.

Hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse against the former USA Gymnastics doctor underscored how vulnerable athletes are, especially when they're minors. That year, Congress and the U.S. Olympic Committee came up with a solution. The U.S. Center for Safe Sport was founded to investigate and respond to allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct. The goal was for predators like Larry Nassar to never harm young athletes again. Well, seven years later, Safe Sport is facing scrutiny of its own over whether it's made good on that promise. Louise Radnovsky is a sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for coming into the studio. Thank you for having me. Describe how SafeSport works. Like, after an athlete makes an allegation of sexual abuse by somebody like a coach, what happens from there? Well, sometimes it's not an athlete. One of the

other things that has happened in the last seven years is that most, if not all, adults who are involved in sport in the U.S. Olympic movement are mandatory reporters. If they hear something, they are in trouble if they don't come forward and say that. And so often the center will hear reports from people saying exactly that. I'm not sure what's going on here, but I heard this and I thought you should know. But whoever gives the report to them, the center then assesses it. There's an intake process. There's some degree of triaging that goes on as well. And then what is supposed to happen next is that if they're going to proceed with a case, the victims who are the subject of the claims will receive a notice. At some point,

the person who's accused of the wrongdoing, the respondent, is supposed to receive a notice of allegations against them, there can be quite a considerable length of time before that arrives. And that's one of the complaints that a number of people have been accused of had. And ultimately, if there's an investigation, and there is a finding, then everybody's informed of that, although the report is supposed to remain confidential. And the only real public facing part of it is that if somebody is issued a very serious sanction, that will appear in a centralized database on the SafeSport website. Why at this point this year has there been so much criticism, so much pressure for change, so many voices calling for a rethinking of how this organization works? There have been a number of high-profile cases where the investigation has seemed to take a very long time or an investigation is still going on.

And it's across a number of different sports. But that is one of the principal complaints that people who have brought claims have had, and people who have had claims brought against them have also complained that this can take years, and during that period of time, it's not a good situation for anyone involved. Victims want closure, people who are accused want to either clear their name or closure, and everybody seems to be suffering, including possibly confidence in the center as a result of the lengthy timeframe. In March, the center said that they would be rolling out some other changes designed to bring more transparency, particularly around the outcomes, in addition to trying to improve the timeliness question. And one of the greater steps towards

transparency that they promised is that you get more clarity about the outcome of a case, not nearly as much clarity as everybody would want, but more clarity than they've been offering before. And so, for example, in the cases that have been resolved through 2022, there are about 1,800 of them. That's a large number. Only about 15% of those cases actually resulted in a finding, and 4,800 of them resulted in a kind of bucket category that didn't give you a lot of sense of what had even gone on. You've interviewed people who are critical of the organization in the past. Are they satisfied with the changes that SafeSport has made? It's very early days in the history of SafeSport, which has been operational for about seven years and where change has been a long

and slow process. But what we are seeing is more and more data from athletes, survey data, that suggests that their confidence in the center is very low. And so people both simultaneously recognize that the culture of sport and the awareness around these issues is significantly different from the way it was 10 years ago. But at the same time, athletes are not necessarily believing that the center can quickly and effectively handle their cases, which is a problem for the center, a problem that the center has acknowledged as well. SafeSport says part of the problem here is resources. They've said they had a 32% increase in reports of sexual abuse last year,

and they asked the U.S. Olympic Committee, which funds the center, for an additional $10 million a year to address this increase. Based on your reporting, is the problem that SafeSport faces one of limited resources, or is it a structural issue? There's certainly a resource problem that SafeSport has identified. 184 reports coming in a week, 30 investigators to handle the cases that the center does decide to take on, and then each investigator handling 8 to 20 cases at a time. And so the tension there between doing the investigation thoroughly and doing it quickly is very, very real. At the same time, there are critics of the center who've also said

the center takes on cases that could be better handled by the national governing bodies of the sport. You'll hear people argue that the center was set up in part because the national governing bodies could not or did not want to or could not effectively handle these cases. Just to give a specific example, earlier this month, the center came under some scrutiny over a case about a gymnastics coach, Anna Lee, who was chosen to be a judge during the Olympic trials. Do you think this is kind of representative? Can this specific case tell us about the issues that the center faces more broadly? It potentially does. The way that that case has been reported and the way I've read about it seems to suggest that it's a case involving emotional abuse allegations, which are notoriously difficult to investigate. You have

different perceptions. You have different ideas over time of what constitutes emotional abuse. You know, often the comparison is made between the U.S. Center for Safe Sport and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. But investigations to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, if you compare them to what you might be looking at in an allegation of emotional and physical abuse, is very different. It's so much more cut and dried with doping. Right. Either a chemical is in the bloodstream or it isn't, but emotional abuse might be a more subjective question. Right. We know with doping cases, they are not easy. But we know that with abuse cases, those are really, really more subjective. Exactly. And so those cases can take a long time. And you can also potentially have participants. And I don't know what's happening in this case specifically, but you can have participants who might be more reluctant, for example, to cooperate with the center. There of SafeSport. Can you take a step back and just reflect on how the culture of Olympic athletes has changed since then?

I mean, we're talking about the shortcomings of this organization, but has there actually been significant progress in this area? I cover gymnastics, especially around the time of the Summer Olympics, and I've covered USA Gymnastics as an organization since 2015. And I have seen- So before Larry Nassar. What we now know to be during many of the core allegations that were made. But yes, before it was publicly known.

And we've certainly seen a major attempt by USA Gymnastics to execute a culture shift that is making the sport look very, very different. So for example, at recent competitions, there's been a therapy dog to support the athletes. There have been counselors on hand to talk with athletes who do not make the Olympic team. And if you look back to the way things were about 20 years ago, when you had the Olympic team announced in front of the athletes on television so that you could cut in and see the faces of the athletes who didn't make the faces of the athletes who didn't make the team versus the ones who did. This is a very different approach. You hear about this

happening more behind closed doors. The culture of coaching and what is considered to be an acceptable thing to say to an athlete has shifted over time. There is an open question. It's something I continue to report on a lot about how much has changed in reality in the day-to-day, but we certainly see the way people talk about coaching differently and what is considered to be a better standard. A lot more emphasis on being positive than perhaps in the past. A lot less emphasis on, well, that's just tough coaching. That's just how it's supposed to be. That's the only way you can get results.

So it's starting to change, maybe. Louise Radnovsky is a sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Thank you so much. Thank you. This episode was produced by Catherine Fink with reporting from Becky Sullivan. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. Before we go, a quick thank you to our Consider This Plus listeners who support the show.

Your contribution makes it possible for NPR journalists all around the world to do their jobs. Supporters also get to hear every episode in even less time with no sponsor messages. Learn more at plus.npr.org. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.