The Gymnast Who Won’t Let Her Daughters Do Gymnastics
Children around the country have spent the past week watching American gymnasts perform dazzling feats at the Tokyo Olympics. They also watched Simone Biles step back from the team finals and all-around competition, citing concerns about her ability to participate safely. What those kids are watching is a sport, and a culture, going through a reckoning over what it takes to achieve athletic greatness, and who is considered disposable along the way.
Rachael Denhollander is one of many people who can no longer watch the Olympics with casual enjoyment. In 2016, she was the first woman to publicly accuse Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics (USAG) team physician, of sexually assaulting her during physical-therapy sessions. A year and a half later, she stood in a Michigan courtroom at Nassar’s sentencing hearing and told her story along with nearly a hundred other women. Shortly before the hearing, Biles, who has been called the greatest gymnast of all time, wrote on social media that she, too, had been abused by Nassar.
[Read: Simone Biles’s critics don’t understand this generation of athletes]
This year’s Olympics are a celebration of athletic achievement, but they’re also a reminder of how the twisted reality of elite gymnastics came to be. Allegations go beyond sexual abuse: Béla and Márta Károlyi, the longtime coaches of the U.S. women’s national gymnastics team, have been accused of physically and verbally abusing athletes, including denying them food. Top stories of abuse. And yet, some evidence of the sport’s brutal culture has long been out in the open, and even celebrated: Kerri Strug was hailed as a national hero when she knowingly vaulted on an injured ankle at the 1996 Olympics, causing her so much pain that Béla Károlyi had to carry her to the podium to claim her gold medal.
