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.
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…
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the U.S. Department of Justice is conducting a probe into how the FBI mismanaged its investigation into sexual abuse allegations made against former Michigan State and USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. Thiis comes after the FBI conducted its own internal review into…
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.
Russian gymnastics legend Svetlana Khorkina, when she’s not busy talking about whether American gymnasts are doping and what she really thinks of WADA (hint: she likened them to a certain WWII Axis power), can be found lending her expertise to the Russian speedskating team—she’s now listed as a “specialist” for the…
According to a press release from Michigan attorney general Bill Schuette’s office, former Michigan State women’s gymnastics coach Kathie Klages has been charged with two counts of lying to investigators.
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…
BOSTON — Simone Biles ascended to the top step of the podium a lot last night. Five times, to be exact. In only her second competition since the Olympic Games in Rio, Biles swept all five titles at the 2018 national championships. She placed first on vault, on uneven bars, on balance beam, in floor exercise, and of…
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,…
Yelena Shushunova, the 1988 Olympic all-around champion, died in St. Petersburg due to complications from pneumonia. She was 49 years old.
When Dutch gymnast Celine van Gerner was introduced for the last time in Glasgow at the 2018 European Championships, she waved to the crowd sporting a full face of cat makeup. The reason: Van Gerner, 23, was set to compete to music from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats for her floor final.
Simone Biles is set to return to competition this weekend at the U.S. Classic in Columbus, Ohio. And in the podium training session today, she showed that she’s set to pick up right where she left off at the Olympics—by winning everything in dominant fashion with incredible skills that virtually no one else can do.
One of the first times we meet Irina Viner-Usmanova, the head of Russia’s dominant rhythmic gymnastics program, in the documentary Over The Limit, she’s berating gymnast Margarita Mamun after a competition. “You were rubbish today,” says Viner-Usmanova, who wears a Justin Timberlake–style straw fedora throughout most…
