Resilience, Redemption, & Respect

My takeaway from Paris 2024

The Olympics just wrapped up and I didn’t get to watch as much as I would have liked, but I did make sure I watched every minute of women’s gymnastics. (In addition to every minute of Pommel Horse Guy, aka Stephen Nedoroscik.)

Long, long ago, I was an entry-level gymnast myself—emphasis on entry-level. I started too late to be very good, but I didn’t care. Gymnastics was one of my favorite things to do as a middle-schooler, and some of my best childhood memories involve practices and even the competition where I fell off the beam. (This year’s beam finals were agonizing to watch, but I could relate.)

Like so many others, I’m heartbroken over the judging errors in the floor finals that drew four athletes into a controversy none of them deserved. But my main takeaway from Olympic gymnastics this year was awe and respect. For Simone Biles.

If you’re not familiar with Biles, she’s redefined the sport with her astonishing athleticism. Watching her on any apparatus is breathtaking. It was therefore a shock when she withdrew from the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. The reason? “The twisties.”

I hadn’t heard of “the twisties” before, but I quickly learned that the condition involved an athlete losing their sense of their own body and where they are in space. That sounds frightening generally, but it’s life-threatening if you’re trying to pull off the kind of stunts Biles does. (You can watch Simone talk about it here.) For her own physical safety, she withdrew from competition.

Her first thought after withdrawing was worrying about what people were saying about her on Twitter: “America hates me. The world is going to hate me,” she feared. She worried she’d “be banned from America.” She was in fact trashed by a number of online commentators for betraying her country, mostly, it seemed, by conservative men. One of her more famous detractors, the current Republican candidate for vice president, found it “so weird…that we’ve tried to turn a very tragic moment—Simone Biles quitting the Olympic team—into this act of heroism. And I think it reflects pretty poorly on our sort of therapeutic society that we try to praise people not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments.” A more appropriate response, he thought, was just acknowledging that “It’s a shame that she quit.”

Simone Biles getting the twisties and withdrawing from the Tokyo Olympics is probably not news to you. But did you know what caused this condition? Here you have to pay a little closer attention to sports, and to conversations around sexual abuse.

Simone was one of hundreds of female gymnasts abused by Larry Nassar. Gymnastics requires phenomenal physical and emotional strength, and Simone was left to work through extensive emotional trauma with virtually no support. “It felt like I held a lot of the guilt that wasn’t mine to hold,” she reflected. Under Covid mandates, she traveled to Tokyo without her family support system. Suppressing the pain and trauma under those circumstances was too much. She held her head up high, and went home.

Between the Tokyo Olympics and her Paris redemption, she set aside time to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

You can watch her full testimony here:

Here’s an excerpt:

Please bear with me. To be perfectly honest, I can imagine no place that I would be less comfortable right now than sitting here in front of you, sharing these comments. My name is Simone Biles, and I am a gymnast who has trained at all levels of the sport….

I am also a survivor of sexual abuse. And I believe without a doubt that the circumstances that led to my abuse and allowed it to continue, are directly the result of the fact that the organizations created by Congress to oversee and protect me as an athlete – USA Gymnastics (USAG) and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) – failed to do their jobs.

Nelson Mandela once said, “there can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.” It is the power of that statement that compels and empowers me to be here in front of you today. I do not want another young gymnast, Olympic athlete, or any individual to experience the horror that I and hundreds of others have endured before, during, and continuing to this day in the wake of the Larry Nassar abuse. To be clear, I blame Larry Nassar, and I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetuated his abuse.

USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee knew that I was abused by their official team doctor long before I was ever made aware of their knowledge. In May of 2015, Rhonda Faehn, the former head of the USA Gymnastics Women’s program was told by my friend and teammate, Maggie Nichols, that she suspected I, too, was a victim. I didn’t understand the magnitude of what all was happening until the Indianapolis Star published its article in the fall of 2016, entitled “Former USA Gymnastics doctor accused of abuse.” Yet, while I was a member of the 2016 US Olympic team, neither USAG, USOPC, nor the FBI ever contacted me or my parents. While others had been informed, and investigations were ongoing, I have been left to wonder why I was not told until after the Rio Games.

This is the largest case of sexual abuse in the history of American sport. And although there has been a fully independent investigation of the FBI’s handling of the case, neither USAG nor USOPC, have ever been made the subject of the same level of scrutiny. These are the very entities entrusted with the protection of our sport and our athletes, and yet it feels like questions of responsibility and organizational failures remain unanswered. As you pursue the answers to those questions, I ask that your work be guided by the same question that Rachel Denhollander and many others have asked: “How Much Is a Little Girl Worth?”

I sit before you today to raise my voice so that no little girl must endure what I, the athletes at this table, and the countless others who needlessly suffered under Nassar’s guise of medical treatment, which we continue to endure today. We suffered and continue to suffer because no one at the FBI, USAG or the USOPC did what was necessary to protect us. We have been failed, and we deserve answers. -Nassar is where he belongs, but those who enabled him deserve to be held accountable. If they are not, I am convinced that this will continue to happen to others -across Olympic Sports. In reviewing the OIG’s Report, it truly feels like the FBI turned a blind eye to us and went out of its way to help protect USAG and the USOPC. A message needs to be sent: If you allow a predator to harm children, the consequences will be swift and severe. Enough is enough.

I will close with one final thought. The scars of this horrific abuse continue to live with all of us. As the lone competitor in the recent Tokyo Games who was a survivor of this horror, I can assure you that the impacts of this man’s abuse are not over or forgotten. The announcement in the spring of 2020 that the Tokyo Games were to be postponed for a year meant that I would going to the gym, to training, to therapy, living daily among the reminders of this story for another 365 days. As I have stated in the past, one thing that helped push me each and every day, was the goal of not allowing this crisis to be ignored. I worked incredibly hard to make sure that my presence could help maintain a connection between the failures and the competition at Tokyo 2020. That has proven to be an exceptionally difficult burden for me to carry, particularly when required to travel to Tokyo without the support of any of my family. I am a strong individual and I will persevere, but I never should have been left alone to suffer the abuse of Larry Nassar. And the only reason I did, was because of the failures that lie at the heart of the abuse that you are now asked to investigate.

It was of course Rachael Denhollander who helped expose Larry Nassar’s crimes. Since that time, Denhollander has continued to work tirelessly to bring justice and reform within the world of USA Gymnastics. For doing so, she’s received national accolades. She has also fought tirelessly to address abuse within evangelical churches, but the accolades there are fewer and farther between. In those spaces, she’s frequently been resisted, slandered, and demonized.

Rachael and Simone have worked in tandem to do everything they could to ensure that other girls wouldn’t face the same abuse they did, and they’ve done so in the face of scathing criticism. For both, bringing perpetrators to justice is only part of the task. They know that change won’t happen unless enablers, too, are held accountable. This task can be far less popular than putting the bad guys behind bars.

When I saw Simone take the floor in Paris, this is the backstory I was thinking about. As I watched her land skill after skill and flash that brilliant smile, I couldn’t stop grinning myself. Just ask my girls, who were watching with me. I kept thinking about what she’d been through, what she put herself through to come back, and what she’s done on behalf of other women and girls.

There’s nothing weak about Simone and what she’s done. It’s a remarkable story of courage, resilience, and victory.

Before you sign off, take two short minutes and watch this video. Pure joy.

And perhaps also pick up a copy of Rachael’s book, What Is a Girl Worth?