Who Has U.S.A. Gymnastics’ Back at This Point? The U.S.O.C., for Some Reason

By reporter Juliet Macur, New York Times, Jan 22, 2018. Yellow highlights my own. To read the full story go here.

The United States Olympic Committee once stepped in to run the national governing body for team handball because it was plagued by “a continued pattern of dysfunction.”

At another time, it stripped the power of the taekwondo federation because it had financial troubles and failed to “effectively confront” its problems. In 2008, it threatened to disband U.S.A. Track & Field because the organization needed to shrink its board of directors.

Those problems seem like jaywalking violations compared with the blatant failure of U.S.A. Gymnastics to protect its young gymnasts from a serial predator like Dr. Lawrence G. Nassar, the longtime national team doctor.

 

And:

“I was not protected,” Jordyn Wieber, a 2012 Olympic gold medalist, said on Friday, as she said in public, for the first time, that Dr. Nassar abused her. “My teammates were not protected. My parents trusted U.S.A. Gymnastics and Larry Nassar to take care of me, and we were betrayed by both.”

In tears, Ms. Wieber described how Dr. Nassar began grooming her with food and gifts when she was 8, and began molesting her when she was 14. How much more does the Olympic committee need to bulldoze U.S.A. Gymnastics, so the organization can be rebuilt without the people who couldn’t see, or didn’t want to see, a monster right before them?

 

And:

Yet in an investigative review paid for by the federation, the former federal prosecutor Deborah J. Daniels described the weaknesses of U.S.A. Gymnastics. One of them was that the board didn’t adequately address the sport’s sexual-abuse problem.

Her report criticized the board because it didn’t hold management accountable for protecting children, failed to routinely question management about the issue and spent “very little time” discussing child-abuse prevention.