A day after former USA Gymnastics CEO Steve Penny was arrested following a grand jury indictment for tampering with evidence in the investigation of Larry Nassar, the New York Times has a new report detailing how Penny behaved with the FBI as its agents looked into reports from gymnasts about the former national team…
Former USA Gymnastics president and CEO Steve Penny has been arrested after a grand jury indicted him for tampering with evidence related to the investigation into years of sexual abuse of athletes by former national team doctor Larry Nassar, according to officials in Walker County, Texas. He was indicted by a Walker…
Well, that was fast. Just five days—and two of those days were weekend days—after her appointment as interim president and CEO of USA Gymnastics was announced, Mary Bono, a former Republican congresswoman from California, has announced she’s resigning from the post.
I’ve been writing about Simone Biles since 2013, when she made her senior international debut at the American Cup. She placed second there, in what wound up being one of the last second-place all-around finishes of her career, but she already displayed all the physical prowess we’ve come to associate with her: speed,…
USA Gymnastics announced the appointment of Mary Bono as interim CEO and president of USA yesterday. Bono previously worked at Faegre Baker Daniels Consulting in Washington, DC. Before that, she was a congresswoman from California. She was first elected in 1998 to replace her husband Sonny Bono, who died in a skiing…
Yesterday, USA Gymnastics hosted its selection camp to help choose the five-person team for the upcoming world championships in Doha. I say “help choose” because the results from this competition—or any competition for that matter—aren’t truly determinative of who will be named or not. Final team composition will be…
When I wrote about the first anniversary of Rachael Denhollander coming forward in the Indianapolis Star about how Larry Nassar sexually abused her under the guise of medical treatment, I struggled with the headline. I generally do, but the story kicked up a bit of a debate over whether the headline should center…
Disgraced former Michigan State and USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar lost today on another one of his requests for a new sentencing hearing, this one in Eaton County, Mich. Like in the case filed against him in Ingham County, multiple women in Eaton said Nassar sexually abused them under the guise of medical…
Kerry Perry, we hardly knew ya. This is mostly because in the nine months that you were in charge of USA Gymnastics, you avoided the media like it was the plague and you had a high deductible health insurance plan. But just because Perry, who was asked to resign by USAG’s board on Tuesday, never really said hello…
For a brief moment after last month’s national championships, it seemed like things were getting better, if only slightly, for USA Gymnastics. We had the return of gymnastics juggernaut known as Simone Biles, who demonstrated that nine months of training is all she needs to become unstoppable in the sport once again.
Have you ever watched Simone Biles do gymnastics and thought, “I need to watch her again, this time in super-slo-mo so I can really appreciate what I just watched”? If so, you’re in luck, because we’ve slowed down Biles’ performance from this weekend’s national championships (where she routed the field by more than…
In December, Larry Nassar—the former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State physician who sexually abused hundreds of women and girls under the guise of medical treatment—was sentenced for the first of three times. In that case, Nassar was sentenced to 60 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to possession of child…
BOSTON — Kerry Perry, the president and CEO of USA Gymnastics, finally faced the media at the 2018 national gymnastics championships today. Perry has appeared before two Senate subcommittee hearings and done a few of brief, very limited teleconferences with journalists, but this was her first, in-depth Q&A with…
BOSTON — We are just eight routines into Simone Biles’s return to competition and I’ve already run out of superlatives to describe just how good she is. I feel like everyone who is tasked with writing about Biles more than once finds themselves reaching for the thesaurus just to find new ways of describing her…
Just the other day, I was talking to a fellow gym nerd about the upcoming world championships in October. “Who’s your number two?” she asked, by which she meant who did I think would win the silver at worlds. I won’t say my answer because I am almost always wrong about these things. I don’t have to say that my number…
Former U.S. Olympic and current UCLA gymnasts Kyla Ross and Madison Kocian have added their voices to the over 150 women who have spoken out against the sexual abuse they experienced from disgraced and imprisoned doctor Larry Nassar. Ross, an Olympic gold medalist on the 2012 team, and Kocian, a gold medalist in 2016,…
Simone Biles won four gold medals and a bronze at the 2016 Olympics, solidifying her position as the greatest female gymnast of all time. Those wins came at the end of an Olympic cycle that saw Biles completely dominate the sport by winning three consecutive world all-around titles, four straight national titles, and…
The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation convened today its third hearing looking into the Larry Nassar scandal, as well as the people and institutions that enabled him to sexually abuse athletes for years under the guise of medical treatment. This one, entitled “Strengthening and Empowering U.S.…
Documents filed last week in a U.S. district court show the full details of the settlement between Michigan State and the sexual abuse victims of its former employee, Larry Nassar. As previously reported, Michigan State will pay a total of $425 million to the 333 survivors who have already come forward, with an…
Kamerin Moore, former elite gymnast and Larry Nassar survivor, posted a video to Youtube this week discussing her struggles with body image after a lifetime spent as a gymnast. “I’ve had poor body image, I mean, as long as I can remember,” she says close to the start. “Like since I hit puberty.”
