In a game that both Bulls guards anticipated, Team USA advanced with an impressive defensive showing that also featured Kevin Durant becoming the all-time scoring leader for the program.
As Colombia's Gonzalez, wife of Lions QB David Blough, qualified for the women's 400m hurdles semifinals, Detroit hosted a watch party.
Melissa Gonzalez may be competing for Colombia, but the Olympian had one of the biggest American crowds supporting her as she qualified for the women's 400m hurdles semifinal on Saturday.
Her husband, David Blough, is the backup quarterback for the Lions, and the franchise held a watch party in Detroit, where the squad started training camp just a few days ago.
“That was pretty cool, man,” Lions’ head coach Dan Campbell said. “It was a moment."
Gonzalez bested her own Colombian national record (55.68) when she finished second with a time of 55.32 in Tokyo. Prior to the event, the Lions put together a good luck video for her. Different players walked in the frame to send her encouragement while some, like Jared Goff, cracked a few jokes.
Blough closed out the video, walking up and high-fiving the camera.
"Love you, honey!"
The women's 400 hurdles final is set to take place Wednesday, Aug. 4.
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Jamaica's Elaine Thompson-Herah broke the Olympic record of 10.62 set by Florence Griffith Joyner at the 1988 Olympics.
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Elaine Thompson-Herah broke Florence Griffith Joyner's Olympic record in 10.61 seconds and into a 0.6 m/s headwind to lead a Jamaican sweep of the medals in the women's 100 meters.
Griffith Joyner's Olympic record of 10.62 was set into a headwind at the 1988 Olympics. Thompson-Herah successfully defended her Olympic title from 2016 to become just the fourth woman to win two Olympic medals.
"I knew I had it in me but obviously I've had my ups and downs with injuries," Thompson-Herah said after the race. "I've been keeping the faith all this time. It is amazing."
Two-time Olympic gold medalist Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce took silver in 10.74. Shericka Jackson clocked a personal best of 10.76 to snag bronze. This is the second time in history and the first time since 2008 that Jamaica has swept the women's 100 meter medals.
"It is special," Jackson said. "I am glad that I am among that one, two, three. It is the first time I have run the 100 meters at a major championship and I got a medal."
For Fraser-Pryce, she was attempting to match Usain Bolt's three gold medals in the 100 meters at 34 years old and competing in her first Games as a mother. She entered the Olympics as the fastest woman of the year after running 10.63 on June 5th in Jamaica. With her silver, Fraser-Pryce is the first person to win four individual Olympic medals in the 100 meters.
Teahna Daniels, who was the lone American in the final, finished seventh in 11.02. The United States was without Sha'Carri Richardson, who won the U.S. Olympic Trials in June but tested positive for marijuana and was suspended for a month. Richardson was widely considered a favorite for a medal with a 10.72 personal best but the 21-year-old will likely have to wait until 2024 to compete in her first Olympics.
Thompson-Herah also surpassed Fraser-Pryce as the second-fastest woman of all-time. Only Griffith-Joyner and her 10.49 world record is faster.
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U.S. men's basketball has a new all-time Olympic scoring leader at 339 points and counting.
Kevin Durant passed Carmelo Anthony, who previously sat atop the list with 336 points, on Saturday as Team USA faced off against the Czech Republic. Coming into Saturday's game with 331 points, Durant needed only six points to make history.
And he did so in the second quarter, lofting up a three-point jumper to push Team USA ahead.
Durant has played in a total of 19 Olympic games that span from the 2012 London Games, 2016 Rio Games and 2020 Tokyo Games. He has scored in double digits in all of them, scoring over 20 points six times and was the team's leading scorer in 2012 and 2016.
While he previously sat behind Anthony as the all-time Olympic scoring leader, he leads USA's all-time career Olympics stats for points averaged (18.9), fourth in games played, fourth in rebounds (88), third in most field goals, first for three-point field goal attempts (203), first in three-point field goals made (60) and tied for sixth in three-post shooting percentage (.526).
Team USA currently leads the Czech Republic 34-33 in the second quarter.
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Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady played all of the 2020 season with a torn MCL in his knee. The team never disclosed it on any of the various injury reports, from regular season through postseason. Some have floated the notion that the Bucs are blameless for hiding the injury because Brady hid it from the Bucs. [more]
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Portland kept former Laker Pau Gasol as an assistant coach after he injured his ankle. He still wanted to play, so he joined Spain's Olympic team.
At the Tokyo Olympics, the 20-year-old University of Oregon runner will be the youngest American man competing in the 1,500 meters in 53 years.
After a four hour delay due to extreme temperatures from a rare Pacific Northwest heat wave, the fans at Hayward Field were rewarded for their patience with a truly thrilling finish to the men’s 1,500 meter final on June 28th. University of Oregon sophomore Cole Hocker maneuvered his way through traffic in the final 200 meters of the race to out-kick reigning Olympic champion and fellow Ducks great Matthew Centrowitz for the victory and his first Olympic team berth.
Although the newly-renovated stadium was nowhere near full capacity due to COVID precautions, Hocker still raised his finger to his lips and hushed the roaring fans. It was a motion toward the doubters who questioned whether a 20-year-old college athlete would be able to hold his own against professionals. It was aimed at those who thought he’d burn out by the time the trials came up due to a long season. It was to those who critique his form.
“I wanted to silence everyone who thought otherwise,” Hocker says.
Hocker closed his final lap in 52.5 seconds to reel in Centrowitz. He won in a personal best of 3:35.28, which was just shy of the auto-qualifying mark for the Tokyo Olympics but he was able to make it to the Games based on his world ranking.
At the Summer Games, where Hocker’s first race will be the preliminary round of the 1,500 meters on Aug. 3, he will be the youngest American man contesting the event in 53 years. In the past decade, Americans have fared well at the Olympics, with Leo Manzano winning silver in 2012—the country’s first since Jim Ryun in 1968—and then Centrowitz ending a 108-year gold drought with a tactical masterclass in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Although Centrowitz returns to defend his title, medal hopes have also been passed onto Hocker.
“There’s some pressure for sure,” Hocker admits. “There’s pressure from myself on myself. Now there’s that pressure that comes with representing the United States since there’s only three of us. I did win the trials so there might be a little bit of a higher expectation but I think doing my best should be enough.”
Hocker has skyrocketed as one of the U.S.’s best middle-distance runners, especially within the past year. A myriad of factors could be at play. Track and field is experiencing a technological boom, with history books and record lists being rewritten due to blazing times caused, in part, by major advances in footwear. As an athlete at Nike’s favorite university, Hocker has the best available weapons to test. New shoes coupled with an extra year of hard training afforded by the Olympic postponement and the talent that won Hocker three Indiana high school state championship titles surely account for some of the unknown variables in the equation for greatness.
His athletic pursuits started at Horizon Christian School in Indianapolis, where he joined the cross-country program as a third-grader. His father, Kyle, volunteered to serve as an assistant coach since he's a teacher in the area and then followed his career through middle school and high school. For him, the earliest sign of promise he observed came at the 2010 Cross Country Coaches Youth National Championship in Lexington, Kentucky, where a nine-year-old Cole, representing his Indy Gold club team, won his age division in 11:19.50 (6:04/mile pace) over the three-kilometer course.
“The program at his elementary school was excellent,” Kyle says. “It was speed-based training. They focused on short interval work and the coaches believed the body would adapt to unaccustomed stresses as long as it wasn’t too much. They just kept seeing how quick they could get him at different paces. He adapted to that really well.”
At Cathedral High School, his coach Jim Nohl applied the same training philosophy but fine-tuned with a more statistical approach since he was also the school’s math teacher. In addition to developing his signature closing speed, Cathedral was also where Cole started growing his long hair as a freshman, so the Sampson comparisons were inevitable as he started winning.
“In my junior year, I started going toward the front of races and taking it,” Cole remembers. “This sort of feels like the same thing. My freshman and sophomore year of high school, I wasn’t dominating or winning any race but junior and senior year I realized my potential. I saw myself at the front of races. Once you have that feeling a couple times, it just comes naturally after that.”
For Cole, angst and nerves in anticipation of big races has always been a consistent factor. Even rewatching some of his races from the past year, Cole still gets nervous despite knowing the outcome. For Kyle and the rest of his family in the stands, the emotional rollercoaster isn’t any easier since Cole enjoys sitting in fourth or fifth place before relying on his kick to get him across the finish line first.
Throughout the year, the Hocker family has hosted a few watch parties with friends for some of Cole’s biggest races. Due to the decision by the International Olympic Committee and Tokyo Olympic organizers to bar spectators from the Games, the Hockers will stay in Indianapolis to watch on television. And with the time difference in Japan, Kyle says they’re planning to just host a viewing party on the morning of Saturday, Aug. 7 for the final. Cole has given them the confidence that he’ll make it that far.
Hocker’s rivalry with Centrowitz grew from unsuspecting roots at a meet last December in California. In a low-key 5,000 meter race, Centrowitz outleaned Hocker at the finish line in 15:32.92 for the win by .03. The next generation of Ducks were literally on the heels of the current stars.
“I think my biggest thing was having Cooper Teare to train with,” Hocker says. “I saw him at the top of his game and the top of the NCAA. I knew if I hung with him in workouts then that’s an immediate path to the top of the NCAA. I was able to do just that.”
Teare was a highly touted recruit out of California and has progressed into a collegiate stud at Oregon, consistently posting results in the top 10 of the NCAA. After a coaching switch in 2018 led several teammates to transfer, Teare stayed put and emerged as one of the vocal leaders of the cross country and distance squad. When Hocker arrived in 2019, Teare got a training partner to push him toward the top of those NCAA lists.
When the Oregon’s campus closed last spring, Hocker returned home to Indianapolis and spent much of the summer training alone. This included solo time trials for the mile in 4:02 and 1:50 for 800 meters. He took a visit to Boulder, Colo., where he joined Teare on a long run on Magnolia Road at more than 8,000 feet above sea level and stayed with the rising senior when the pace quickened to 5:20 per mile. By the end of the run, it was just the two of them.
Teare and Hocker reunited in August and faced a decision on whether the Ducks wanted to focus their training toward the indoor track season or the delayed cross country championships that were set for March. As a team, they figured sticking to the track would offer them the best chance at winning an NCAA team title, so they spent the fall running small time trials in an empty Hayward Field under the watchful eye of coach Ben Thomas. During their 3,000 meter time trial, Teare ran 7:44, which would be good enough to crack the NCAA indoor all-time top-10 list and Hocker was just one second back.
“I had to do everything I could in that last lap to not get caught by him,” Teare recalls. “I thought, ‘OK. This kid is going to be good.’ Right off the bat indoors, it was the Cole show.”
On Feb. 12, the first shockwaves from the next generation were felt at an indoor meet in Fayetteville, Ark. Teare and Hocker both destroyed the previous NCAA indoor mile record of 3:52.01 from 17-time NCAA champion Edward Cheserek (another former Ducks star) by running 3:50.39 and 3:50.55, respectively. In his post-race Instagram post, Oregon walk-on Carter Christman tagged Centrowitz in the comments section, saying, “Your move.” This led to a fiery response by Centrowitz and sent the niche track and field running community into a frenzy over the perceived “beef” between the two runners—despite no comment by Hocker.
A month later on the same Arkansas track, Hocker took down Teare at the NCAA indoor championships in the 3,000m, his second national title of the day after winning the mile 90 minutes earlier. The day before, Hocker and his Oregon teammates had won the distance medley relay, an event where earlier in the season they had run the world’s fastest time ever. Hocker led the relay off with a blistering 2:49.89 split for 1,200 meters.
Hocker entered the outdoor season full of momentum, but new challenges quickly presented themselves. At a home meet on May 7, fans had their first opportunity to see Hocker against Notre Dame’s Yared Nuguse, the 2019 NCAA outdoor champion in the 1,500 meters, who decided bypassed the indoor season to help the Irish cross country team finish second at the NCAA cross country championships. Nuguse kicked to win in 3:35.96 and Hocker set a personal best of 3:36.47 for third place behind teammate Teare.
According to Teare, Hocker was not happy with his performance, and he took it out on their 7 x 200-meter post-race workout. The first few reps started at 30 seconds and progressed to 26 seconds but Hocker decided to close it out with a low 23-second rep.
“I remember watching that and thinking, ‘What the f--- is he dropping?’” Teare recalls. “I ran like 24-mid and he had daylight on me. How?!”
Nuguse followed up his win by setting the NCAA record in the 1,500 meters with a solo 3:34.68 at the ACC championships. In the rematch five weeks later, Hocker would have the last word as he dethroned Nuguse and beat him by .25 seconds in a personal best of 3:35.35.
“[This season] really did go off without a hitch,” Hocker says. “That’s sort of what I was telling myself going into the trials, ‘You only get this opportunity that you stay healthy for this long and you stay racing at the top level.’ This was just an opportunity that doesn’t present itself typically in this sport.”
In the weeks leading up to the Olympics, Hocker passed on opportunities to race at Diamond League meets, including a prestigious meet in Monaco, where the men’s 1,500 typically produces the fastest times of the year. At the 2021 edition of the race, reigning world champion Timothy Cheruiyot ran a personal best of 3:28.28, the No. 7 mark of all time. Norwegian prodigy Jakob Ingebrigtsen ran 3:29.25, meaning Hocker may not even be the top 20-year-old in his event at the Olympics.
All the while, Hocker and some of his Oregon teammates stayed back to train at Hayward Field and make the most of Eugene’s trails. The system has worked up until this point, so why change it?
“Of course this is the biggest stage in the sport,” Hocker acknowledges. “In my head I’ve compared it to—and this might sound silly—I had never been to NCAA indoor championships. I went there and was able to win two titles. I had never been to an outdoor NCAA championship and I was able to win the 1,500. I had never been to the U.S. trials and I was able to win the race there. I’m sort of looking at it like that. I’ve never been to the Olympics but I’ve been able to execute on stages I’ve never been to before and I think this should be the same way.”
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While not a new idea, mixed-gender competitions are a big initiative at the Games.
Very Olympic Today is SI’s daily Olympics newsletter. You can receive each issue for free in your inbox by
subscribing here. To continue reading the newsletter at SI.com every day, along with the rest of our Olympics coverage, readers can subscribe to SI.com here.It was a historic day at the Tokyo Olympics (aren’t they all?) but not just because of performances like Caeleb Dressel’s world record in the 100-meter butterfly.
Five events made their Olympic debuts. Try to see if you can spot the pattern:
The 4 x 400-meter mixed team relay (track), 4 x 100-meter medley (swim), mixed team triathlon, mixed team judo and mixed team trap shooting.
That’s five different events in which men and women competed together on the same teams for the same medals. This is not a new idea in the Olympic program (they played mixed doubles tennis at the 1900 Games in Paris, though the event disappeared from 1928 through 2008), but it’s clearly become more of an emphasis.
I’m sure plenty of people reading this newsletter tuned into the swimming in prime time and watched that relay, with Dressel swimming the anchor for a U.S. team that failed to medal. But you may not have noticed it’s part of a much larger trend. Equality between men’s and women’s sports has been a goal across the Olympics—we’ve seen several sports eliminate men’s weight classes and add women’s brackets in an effort to make those numbers more even—and adding these events appears to be a separate, though related, initiative.
I liked what I saw, and I’ll give you two reasons.
First, I like the strategy element, with countries considering different ways to build teams and order their athletes. In both the swimming and running relays, we saw teams try different orders, which led to certain teams getting out to big leads and trying to hold on. (Pat Forde has a column from the pool about the U.S.’s disaster on this front.)
Second, I just like the idea of having more opportunities to see the top athletes in action. It’s one more time we get to see Caeleb Dressel in the pool. Katie Zaferes won bronze in the women’s triathlon, and that would normally be all we get to see of her. But we got to see her in action again, trading legs of a relay with male and female teammates as the U.S. won another silver medal. Judo is a sport where you can lose a match within seconds and be knocked entirely out of the bracket. French heavyweight legend Teddy Riner (who won gold in London and Rio) lost on Friday and took home a bronze medal individually. But I turned on the France vs. Israel mixed team judo quarterfinal, and got to see him not just competing again, but actively involved in cheering on his teammates as they competed with him. (Just FYI: The team judo involves a series of individual matches. It is not a six-on-six judo battle royale. I don’t want to get your hopes up too high.) France made it to the finals, giving Riner a fifth medal in his fourth Olympics.
I imagine these events are here to stay, and we will likely only see more like them in time. I’d call that a good thing. In the era of superteams and super leagues, most people just want to see the best athletes as much as possible. The Olympics are a TV show designed to get ratings. If they already have so many of the best athletes in the world all together, they might as well give us more ways to watch them.
Speaking of that team relay, the U.S. was disqualified for an illegal baton transfer in the morning heats. I recommend watching the video of the whole race 1) to see an example of what I wrote above, as Nigeria sends a man out for the third leg against all women and he builds a huge lead that evaporates and 2) to watch the U.S. team learn in real time that it had been DQ’d.
(Lynna Irby took it in stride like a champ, but the team was reinstated on appeal anyway.)
After the race, Sha’Carri Richardson, the sprinter who was disqualified from the Olympic team because she tested positive for marijuana after winning the 100-meters at the U.S. trials, tweeted: Missing me yet?
The tweet got mixed results.
What’s left to say about Katie Ledecky? She won her third straight Olympic gold in the 800-meter freestyle, and here are some of my favorite stats in the aftermath.
Before the race, the TV broadcast showed that she had the top 23 times in the world in the event. Australian Ariarne Titmus won silver by swimming the fastest 800 ever by a woman other than Ledecky, a distinction previously set in 2008. As The Ringer’s Rodger Sherman put it, Ledecky set the record as a 16-year-old, Ledecky beat that mark 23 more times and Titmus is the first woman ever to beat 16-year-old Ledecky.
Ledecky now has 10 Olympic medals, seven of which are gold. Six are individual gold, which is the most by any female swimmer (behind only Michael Phelps’s 13). She is the 15th Olympian with 10 medals, and she is the third woman to win gold in the same event in three straight Olympics. And keep in mind that she would have more medals, and more golds, if the women’s 1,500-free had been an Olympic race her whole career.
She also told the world in her post-race interview that she’s not done.
This is not unexpected at this point, but it is news: Simone Biles is officially out of the vault and uneven bars individual finals.
As we saw with Suni Lee’s all-around gold, Biles’s absence creates opportunities for her teammates. Here’s what Biles tweeted when it looked like MyKayla Skinner was done competing at the Olympics.
And here’s Skinner after finding out she gets to compete in the vault finals.
Group play is now over, so it’s time for a big-picture look. The headline: All four U.S. teams advanced into the knockout stage.
On the women’s side, both U.S. teams—April Ross and Alix Klineman; and Kelly Claes and Sarah Sponcil—went 3–0 to win their respective groups. They are on opposite sides of the bracket and would not have to meet each other until the gold-medal game.
On the men’s side, Jake Gibb and Tri Bourne went 2–1 to finish second in their group; and Nick Lucena and Phil Dalhausser went 2–1 but finished third. They are on the same side of the bracket and would face each other in the semifinals if they were to advance that far.
The rugby is over, and I am sad. If anyone out there runs a rugby sevens fantasy league in non-Olympic years, please hit me up. Location and time of day matches are played would not be deal-breakers.
The U.S. women’s team beat China to reach the fifth place game, but fell to Australia to finish sixth. New Zealand beat France for the gold medal, and Fiji topped Great Britain to win the bronze.
I caught some of the women’s 3-meter springboard semifinals, and two divers from Team USA qualified for the finals. One is Krysta Palmer, who came in fifth. The other is Hailey Hernandez, who came in 10th. Palmer has been on the scene for a while and won a bronze medal at the 2017 world championships. But Hernandez just turned 18 in March and was supposed to be diving at the junior national championships this week in Indianapolis. Instead, she qualified for Tokyo and then made it all the way to the Olympic finals. I’m sure she and her family (and all the competitors at the junior national championships in Indianapolis!) are very happy.
Brady Ellison, the No. 2 seed in the men’s archery competition, lost his quarterfinal match against Turkey’s Mete Gazoz. That ended a disappointing Olympics for Ellison, who did not medal in individual, team or mixed team. Gazoz was seeded No. 10, but went on to win gold, so clearly he got hot at the right time. For what it’s worth, the bracket did not come close to following all chalk. Silver medalist Mauro Nespoli was No. 24 and bronze medalist Takaharu Furukawa was No. 46. Ellison beat fellow American Jacob Wukie in the round of 16 for his final win. And all credit to Gazoz, who ripped off three straight 10s in the fifth set to get past Ellison.
Archery is over, but I’ll be recommending it three years from now. It’s a sport that lends itself well to TV, with cameras zooming in on their faces as they, how shall we put this, smoosh part of the bow against their faces to steady themselves; with the slo-mo replays showing the arrows gently wobble through the air; and with the dramatic cuts to the target before those arrows arrive.
The U.S. men lost to Hungary 11-8, dropping the team to 2-2 in group play. That makes two straight losses, though the team still has a plus-15 goal differential, thanks to a blowout win against South Africa. Four out of six teams advance out of the group into the quarterfinals, so the team’s medal hopes are still alive.
It was a rough night for the U.S. women’s indoor team, not just losing in straight sets to the ROC, but suffering an injury in the process. Jordan Thompson had been the team’s leading point-scorer, but landed hard on her ankle early in the second frame. It’s too early to know if/when she’ll be back.
Yeah, a windsurfing update! Because I watched some at 1:30 in the morning. One thing I am always reminded of during the Olympics is that even if there is something you do not have strong feelings about, or particularly know much about, there are always people out there who care a great deal about it.
Competitive sailing is a world I have just had very little exposure to. But I always enjoy tuning into sports for at least 15 minutes just to hear what’s going on and the way they’re talked about. The commentator on this night was talking about how the style of boards they use in the Olympics has evolved over time (useful info). And he was also talking about how the windsurfing community was worried the sport would be voted out of the Olympics in 2012, but it survived (another good fact).
I guess what I’m saying is, when you listen to the top analysts in the world in a given sport, you get the best commentary:
Nigerian sprinter is out of the Olympics after testing positive for HGH.
Remember Sam Kendricks, the pole vaulter who tested positive for COVID-19 on the eve of the Olympics? USA Today’s Tom Schad has a story about Matt Ludwig, his replacement, who went from packing a bag in Ohio to competing in Tokyo in 48 hours.
Two judokas from Georgia were ejected from the Olympics for leaving the athletes’ village to go sightseeing. They had finished competing already, but given the COVID-19 numbers in Japan, it’s important for everyone to follow the rules.
It’s been a while since I updated everyone on the quadrathlon, my competition against colleague Dan Gartland, in which we drafted teams in five sports with no U.S. team in the picture. With group play over in field hockey, it’s time for an update. And the update is: I know how to pick field hockey teams.
I adopted both Australian teams. The men are 4–1. The women are 5–0. As for Gart’s teams: India went 4–1 (losing to my Kookaburras) and the Argentinian women went 3–2.
All four teams are in the knockout stage, which will make for some fun stakes in the single-elimination tournament.
All four of our handball teams (Norway’s men and Spain’s women for me; Sweden’s men and ROC’s women for him) are currently projected to make the knockout stage, but group play hasn’t concluded yet.
I have a slight advantage overall, but am at a disadvantage with Argentina’s failure to get out of group play in men’s soccer. (He has Mexico.)
Here’s our Google Doc with the schedule and standings, if you want to follow along.
Friday night and Saturday morning, all times ET.
Golf: The final round of the men’s tournament starts at 6:30 p.m. Saturday. The leaders tee off at 10:09 p.m.
Track and field: The Saturday night session starts at 8:10 p.m., and the only medal event is the women’s shot put. The morning session picks up at 6:10 a.m. Sunday with medals in men’s high jump, women’s triple jump and the men’s 100-meters at 8:50 a.m. Usain Bolt won the event three Games in a row, but a new Fastest Man in the World will be crowned at the Olympics for the first time since 2004.
Cycling: The women’s and men’s BMX park final starts at 9:10 p.m. Saturday
Swimming: It’s the final night of indoor swimming! Starting at 9:30 p.m. Saturday, all races are finals: men’s and women’s 50-meter free, men’s 1,500-meter free, women’s and men’s 4x100-meter medley
Sailing: Men’s and women’s one-person dinghy medal races start at 1:33 a.m. Sunday
Diving: The women’s 3m springboard final starts at 2:00 a.m. Sunday
Tennis: Three gold-medal matches start at 2:00 a.m. Sunday: women’s doubles gold (Czech Republic vs. Switzerland), followed by men’s singles (Germany’s Alexander Zverev vs. ROC’s Karen Khachanov) and mixed double’s gold (two ROC teams).
Gymnastics: The individual events begin at 4:00 a.m. Sunday with the men’s floor exercise, women’s vault, men’s pommel horse and women’s uneven bars.
Fencing: Men’s team foil medal matches start at 5:30 a.m. Sunday
Weightlifting: Women’s 76kg at 6:50 a.m. Sunday
Badminton: Women’s singles medal matches start at 7:30 a.m. Sunday
Beach volleyball: Kelly Claes and Sarah Sponcil are in the round of 16 against Canada at 8:00 p.m. Saturday. The men’s schedule won’t be finalized until after competition Saturday morning.
Wrestling: We get our first taste of Olympic wrestling at 10:00 p.m. Saturday. Two members of Team USA are in action on the first night: Ildar Hafizov and Adeline Gray.
Boxing: Duke Ragan fights Ireland’s Kurt Anthony Walker at 10:30 p.m. Saturday
Boxing: Richard Torrez Jr. fights Cuba’s Dainier Pero at 6:06 a.m.
Table tennis: The U.S. women’s team plays against Chinese Taipei at 6:30 a.m.
Equestrian: Eventing cross country team and individual starts at 6:45 p.m. Saturday
Volleyball: U.S. men vs. Argentina at 8:45 a.m.
Baseball: Team USA’s upcoming schedule depends on a game being played Saturday morning against South Korea. Check listings elsewhere when that game ends.
Every day Brian Cazeneuve will give us a few medal predictions for some upcoming events.
Cycling, Men’s BMX Freestyle Park
Gold: Logan Martin (Australia)
Silver: Rim Nakamura (Japan)
Bronze: Justin Dowell (U.S.)
Martin won the X Games in 2018 and 2019. Dowell built his own skate park in Virginia Beach and is known for his signature trick, The Twix.
Gymnastics, women’s uneven bars
Gold: Nina Derwael (Belgium)
Silver: Suni Lee (U.S.)
Bronze: Angelina Melnikova (ROC)
The inventive Derwael has debuted two versions of a Tkatchev release skill. Belgium has never won gold in Olympic gymnastics.
Diving, women’s 3-meter springboard
Gold: Han Wang (China)
Silver: Shi Tingmao (China)
Bronze: Jennifer Abel (Canada)
At 29, Abel is competing in her fourth Olympics. Chinese divers have won this event at the last eight Olympics.
Track and field, men’s high jump
Gold: Mutaz Essa Barshim (Qatar)
Silver: Ilya Ivanyuk (ROC)
Bronze: Maksim Nedasekau (Belarus)
Barshim won bronze in London and silver in Rio. He started out as a long jumper.
• Friday’s SI Daily Cover: The medals keep piling up, but at what cost? Lauren Green’s in-depth look at the culture of USA Gymnastics.
• Avi Creditor wrote about the USWNT’s dramatic win over the Netherlands in penalty kicks to reach the women’s soccer semifinals. This game was in progress when Friday morning’s newsletter went out.
• And Michael Rosenberg on the heroics of goalie Alyssa Naeher.
• Here’s Pat Forde on USA Swimming’s struggles in the relays.
• And Forde on Caeleb Dressel’s big night, swimming three races.
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The weekend is here, and we’re halfway through the Olympics. Hopefully I have the math on the 13-hour time zone difference figured out by now
Thanks for reading.
— Mitch
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The U.S. could use a relay revival to end on at the Olympics after a disappointing fifth-place finish in the inaugural mixed medley.
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TOKYO — The reason the United States finished a sobering fifth in the first Olympic mixed medley swimming relay was not the performance of any of the four swimmers. But the sight of 17-year-old Lydia Jacoby persevering through the breaststroke leg with her goggles in her mouth, having rolled down her face after diving in, served as an apt metaphor.
It was a snapshot of a relay gone wrong.
Scheduling issues, stamina issues, experience issues—and perhaps biggest of all, trust issues—likely played parts in the worst U.S. relay finish in Olympic history. Coaches Dave Durden and Greg Meehan admittedly “overanalyzed” the race in going with a flawed lineup, though freestyle star Caeleb Dressel also spoke some truth when he noted that “we don’t have the pieces right now.” The coaches were not playing a flush hand.
This is a weird, gimmicky new Olympic event, with two women and two men swimming the four legs. Strategic trial and error can be expected as coaches around the world wrap their arms around it. But they serve up medals for it like every other relay—and the Americans finishing fifth is a forehead slapper for sure.
“Fifth place is unacceptable for USA Swimming and we’re aware of that,” Dressel said. “The standard is gold.”
After what Durden and Meehan described as extensive study of all the numbers, plus a dash of “gut feel,” they opted for a lineup strategy that differed significantly from the other seven finalists. The U.S. was the only relay team that put a female breaststroker to go up against the fastest human ever in that event, Great Britain’s Adam Peaty. It also was the only relay to anchor the freestyle leg with a male—and while Dressel is the fastest in the world in the 100 free, he was destined to be too far behind to make a difference.
By times, the largest gap between men’s and women’s gold medalists here is in breaststroke. Peaty, who is the world-record holder, won the 100 breast in a time 7:58 seconds faster than Jacoby’s gold-medal effort. So why did the Americans roll the dice on the biggest of mismatches? And why did they risk leaving their best relay swimmer (Dressel) in a too-little, too-late position?
The answer is multi-layered. But here are some of the factors:
• Not going with a male breaststroker is the easiest second guess. But the U.S's best in that event, Michael Andrew, had just contested a 50 freestyle minutes earlier—and if there is one thing we’ve seen with Andrew and his light training regimen, his stamina is not the best. (Dressel, by comparison, had no problem swimming the 50 and then producing a fast relay leg in his third swim of the morning.) Also, having been coached by his father on a one-man team for most of his life, Andrew has less relay experience than most and might not be as committed to the team cause. Lastly, there is the significant fact that Andrew has been one of the bigger disappointments of this competition so far—or was until the time when the relay lineup had to be submitted an hour before the session started. (Andrew then swam a good 50 free to make the final in that event.)
The other option from the individual 100 breaststroke was Andrew Wilson, who was O.K. but not great in the mixed medley preliminary and had already logged 800 meters of racing this week. The best play might have been Nic Fink, who finished fifth in the 200 breast. He’s had some quality relay performances in the past.
Jacoby fought hard in her leg, especially given the fact that her goggles were literally in her mouth—“I was definitely panicking a little bit,” she said. That’s a mishap routinely seen in age-group races but almost never at this level. (Yes, Michael Phelps swam with water in his goggles in the 2008 Olympics 200 butterfly, but that was a momentary flip where they still remained on his eyes, not in his mouth. Jacoby was only wearing one swim cap, as opposed to two, which increases the chances of a total goggle malfunction.)
Jacoby’s time was good—nearly as fast as her gold-medal mark. For an Olympic rookie, that’s a game effort under extreme duress. She showed some character in that moment. But ideally, relay swimmers are .5 to .7 faster with benefit of a flying start instead of a flat start.
Even if her goggles had stayed on and she’d gone a second faster, Jacoby wasn’t going to put the U.S. on the podium. But the Alaskan had no international relay experience, and likely no high-level relay experience nationally. Lilly King, world-record holder in the 100 breast, has been through the international battles and was certainly an option—theoretically one capable of posting something in the low 1:04 or high 1:03 range. But she hadn’t been faster than 1:05 in four 100s in Tokyo; Jacoby beat her handily head-to-head; and King was coming off an all-out 200 breast the day before.
Ultimately, the breaststroke problem was less Jacoby’s performance than her presence on the relay in place of a man. That’s not her fault.
• Dressel was absolutely going to be used on this relay, and moving him up to butterfly would have increased his impact on the race. Torri Huske, in her first Olympics, did not produce a stellar relay split, although part of that could be attributed to being caught up in the wash behind several other teams. Regardless, it contributed to the hole Dressel had to try to swim out of at the end.
But replacing him with a female on the freestyle leg also was not a cut-and-dry call—because who do you choose? The U.S.'s best 100 free swimmer, Abbey Weitzeil, was coming off a 50 just minutes earlier. So was Simone Manuel, a relay star for years struggling with health issues in 2021. The best option in that spot might have been Natalie Hinds, who twice turned in good legs on the 400 freestyle relay earlier in the week.
Quite simply, American swimming has never had an Olympic relay meet this bad. Five relays in, the results are one gold (men’s 400 freestyle), one silver (women’s 800 freestyle), one bronze (women’s 400 freestyle) and two podium misses (fourth in the men’s 800 and this fifth). And don’t look now, but the American men will be underdogs to Great Britain in the medley relay Sunday—an event the U.S. has never lost at the Olympic level.
Egos battered, the U.S. could use a relay revival to end this meet and reassert itself. To do that, the Americans need to very quickly solve some trust issues and find the right eight people to finish the job.
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Time after time, USA Gymnastics has pledged to reform itself. Gymnasts and their parents, though, say the organization still fails to hold coaches accountable for abusive behavior.
Ashley Davis needed surgery. She had been competing on a shattered ankle throughout the 2003 gymnastics season and eventually decided to have the injury repaired. The night before, she went back to the gym, where she says her coach, Kurt Thomas, told her to warm up on floor exercise, because she was having the procedure the next day and additional damage “didn’t matter.”
Davis, then 18, knew better than to argue with him. So she went ahead and tumbled, until a snap loud enough for the whole gym to hear rang out. She had overcompensated for her injured left ankle by pushing off her right foot even more. The snap was the sound of that foot breaking. Davis fell to the ground, unable to place pressure on the limb. She didn’t cry as she crawled off the floor. No one stopped. The tumbling continued all around her.
Where other coaches in other sports might have rushed to comfort an ailing athlete, Davis says Thomas berated her—a practice ingrained deeply in gymnastics. She says the coach blamed her injury on her weight (“this is what five extra pounds looks like”) and that he called her washed up and told her to “just go to college.” (She had an athletic scholarship lined up to compete at the University of Oklahoma, but had deferred one year to continue training for the Olympics.) Davis believes that she simply no longer seemed valuable to him.
Before she could crawl to her locker at the Frisco, Texas, facility, Davis says Thomas made the group of tween gymnasts that was practicing march around the floor, clapping and singing “It’s a Hard Knock Life.” Even after all that, Davis didn’t tell her parents what had happened. Looking back, she doesn’t know why. She had been told she was fat, and that’s why the injury happened. And, anyway, she was a gymnast, and this was how many gymnasts trained. (Thomas did not address any allegations of abuse before his June 2020 death due to complications from a stroke; a representative from Kurt Thomas Gymnastics denied that Davis was told to tumble on an injured ankle and that the young gymnasts mocked her.)
Davis, now 36, still doesn’t know how many bone chips the initial ankle injury yielded. “They stopped counting after 100,” she says. In addition to the break when her other foot snapped that day, Davis had torn every ligament in her right foot, too.
How Davis says her coach handled that night embodies both a rotten system and a sport in turmoil. Her experience, terrible as it was, echoed dozens of others, from gyms across the country, at all levels of the sport. And still does.
Long before the sports world ever heard of Larry Nassar, journalist Joan Ryan exposed the abusive culture of gymnastics in her 1995 book, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes. Former gymnast Jennifer Sey then wrote about the abusive culture of the sport in 2008, detailing the harm that athletes suffer in her book Chalked Up. “Tremendous backlash” met the seven-time national team member within the sport’s community. Some called her bitter because of how her career ended. Critics labeled her a liar and posited that none of her claims could possibly be true. When Olympic gold medalist Dominique Moceanu put out her memoir, Off Balance, in 2012, she experienced similar backlash.
The pushback served as a warning for others who may have considered speaking up at that time: If you don’t fall in line, this is how you will be treated.
Then last June Netflix released its documentary Athlete A, coproduced by Sey. The streaming platform pushed the abusive gymnastics lifestyle, known mostly inside the sport’s insular community, into the wider world, for all to see.
While the film focused much of its attention on the horrific sexual abuse perpetuated by Nassar, the disgraced ex-doctor, the link between gymnastics’s culture and the biggest sex abuse scandal in sports history became abundantly clear. Larry Nassar did not happen overnight. Instead, he was the result of a system that valued fear and silence.
“The fact that this man was able to abuse unchecked for so many years is linked to the fact that we have created a culture that demands total obedience,” Sey says.
The documentary prompted a wave of athletes and parents to share their experiences last summer using the hashtag #GymnastAlliance on social media. The stories centered almost exclusively on emotional and physical abuse in the sport and highlighted the lasting consequences: mental illness diagnoses, body dysmorphia and long-term physical pain—the byproducts of a life spent in that system. The flood of posts on Twitter and Instagram were enough to think that maybe this time would be different.
But more than a year later, with another Olympic Games underway, little has changed. When Simone Biles, herself a survivor of Nassar,
withdrew from the team and all-around finals in Tokyo, it opened a deeper discussion on mental health and the pressure cooker that is the U.S. gymnastics program. In a sport where coaches exercise so much power over athletes, other gymnasts marveled at Biles’s ability to make her own decision, for herself (to be clear: Biles’s coaches were supportive). Biles herself spoke of a system that had worn her down and drained all fun from competition.Nassar may be gone, but at root, that system—the way USA Gymnastics trains and develops athletes—remains the same. Even after yet another reckoning last summer, the organization remains unable—or unwilling—to hold its coaches accountable—in part because the mechanisms to do so are still broken. To detail the problems inherent in the sport, 16 athletes and parents spoke to Sports Illustrated, painting a striking, startling picture. Between them, the group has formally reported 19 coaches for abusive behavior over the last 22 years. Fourteen can still train gymnasts without restrictions, while three others will be permitted to coach unsupervised after completing education classes. (Of the remaining two, one, Thomas, is dead and the other remains on an interim suspension.) The system is designed to protect the coaches first, not the athletes, these families say.
They point to how USA Gymnastics has appeared to treat Nassar as an isolated predator who has been removed. It was time, officials have said, to move on, even when survivors came forward to demand an independent investigation that was never granted. USAG failed to recognize that this wasn’t just one doctor taking advantage of athletes or just an issue at the highest levels of the sport. Athletes were silenced when they tried to speak up, shunned if they did speak out and taught time and time again to question the validity of what happened to them.
This wasn’t a public relations nightmare. It was a system that may have created champions but also left a trail of gymnasts who were beaten down and broken in its wake. Gymnastics did not have a Larry Nassar problem, the SI sources say. Instead, the sport has an abuse problem that existed long before Nassar became international news.
And they wonder, is there anything that could finally make the system change?
The experiences of the gymnasts and parents who SI talked to ranged in date from the late 1990s to as recently as last year. This wasn’t just one place or one coach or even one problem. The coaches they spoke about didn’t discriminate based on age, talent level or the caliber of the gym. It didn’t matter if you were a seven-year-old newbie training at a small program in Utah or a 12-year-old on the elite path at one of America’s most well-known facilities. (The culture on the U.S. men’s side appears to be different. Issues of abuse have not surfaced there in the same way they have within the women’s program.)
From those 16 interviews, a composite sketch emerged: Gymnasts are trained to be silent. They are taught to just keep training through injuries and that they aren’t really that hurt. They realize that fear isn’t tolerated. Athletes are manipulated into believing that this is normal. This is just how gymnastics is. This is just tough coaching.
“Coaches teach you to not trust your own reality by telling you you’re not really hurt. You’re making it up. You’re exaggerating,” says Sara Rowland, who trained as a child and teen at Chelsea Piers in New York City from 2001 to 2011. “Your fear is not valid and you just learn to question your experiences over and over again. Was my experience really that bad? Was it really abuse? Was it really worth sharing or doing something about? Is it true?”
Fear, of course, is a natural part of a high-flying, acrobatic sport like gymnastics, and it is also a leverage point often abused by coaches. Two gymnasts from separate Texas gyms detailed to SI their experiences of being stuck up on the balance beam for hours because they were afraid of a skill. They knew if they came down without doing it, they could be pulled from a competition or moved to a lower level. Excessive conditioning is also a common punishment in many competitive gyms for falling or not picking up corrections quickly (this is not the take a lap or give-me-20 variety of punishment, but closer to climb the ropes for hours).
Gymnasts also learn quickly that weight becomes something that coaches obsess about and hold over their heads. If you weren’t so fat, you’d make that skill. Shedding pounds, even in unhealthy ways, earns praise. These same coaches can impact and shape their athletes’ futures, from college scholarships to national team opportunities.
“It’s just a much deeper level. It’s not just being strict,” says former gymnast Hailee Hoffman, who competed for Stanford until graduating in 2019. “It’s not just about gymnastics. It’s not ‘Oh, that was a bad skill,’ it’s ‘You’re a bad person. You don’t deserve anything. You could do this if you weren’t so fat.’ That’s not about gymnastics anymore.”
Meanwhile, this culture shuts out parents almost entirely. As gymnasts climb levels—from novice upward—some gyms don’t allow moms and dads at practice. And athletes are often discouraged from talking about what goes on in the gym at home, lest it lead their parents to question the coaches.
“As parents we don’t even realize how bad it is because of the whole ‘Don’t tell your parents’ and ‘Oh, this is just tough coaching,’ ” says one Texas mom, who requested anonymity. “If you want to be the best, this is what the tough coaches do.”
Davis, the promising elite who shattered her ankle and broke her other foot, ended up training at Kurt Thomas Gymnastics full time for seven years, then again during college breaks. In 2008 she moved on to coach at Eagle Gymnastics, less than a mile away. She tried to report Thomas’s behavior as early as 2009, reaching out to a local gymnastics judge who also taught the USAG safety course in Texas and sharing “everything.” Like how she consumed only lemon water with cayenne pepper while training twice daily. Or how Thomas gave her prescription diet pills and laxatives as a teenager. Or how she ran in a “trash bag suit” in the middle of oppressive Texas summers for the two hours in between training sessions.
Now no longer competing, she did not come forward just for herself. Instead, as a coach of young gymnasts, she didn’t want the cycle she had endured to continue with another group of little girls. But USAG had no real mechanism for handling complaints of abuse at the time; the judge addressed the issue directly with the gym, which, of course, was run by Thomas. Nothing came of it. (The gymnastics judge did not respond to requests for comment; a representative from Kurt Thomas Gymnastics said in an email that the gym was not aware of Davis’s complaint.)
Eventually, Davis moved on from gymnastics entirely. She had spoken up, attempted to make a report and nothing happened. When another young woman came forward about abuse at Thomas’s gym a decade later, Davis cringed. It was exactly what she hoped to prevent.
In the five years since Rachael Denhollander and Jamie Dantzscher levied the first public accounts of sexual abuse against Larry Nassar, the high-level doctor for Michigan State and USA Gymnastics who remains in prison, more than 500 athletes have come forward to say they were abused by him. His sentencing hearing captured the world’s attention and forced viewers to finally listen to the numerous survivors who gave heartbreaking accounts in court. Denhollander, the final survivor to deliver an impact statement, posed the question that reverberated across social media and news clips: How much is a little girl worth?
In the aftermath, the NCAA and the U.S. Olympic Committee launched separate investigations. The entire USA Gymnastics board tendered their resignations under threat of decertification by the USOC. Dozens of lawsuits were brought against USAG, MSU and the Olympic Committee. Eventually, USAG released statement after statement commending the gymnasts’ bravery in coming forward. “Athlete welfare” and “athlete safety” and “empowerment” became buzzwords as USAG pledged to put the competitors at the forefront of the sport.
All of which spoke to the same, obvious thing: The scandal could have—and should have—been a catalyst for a systemic overhaul, to prioritize athletes over success and safety over reputations. Most in the gymnastics community agreed the entire sport needed to change.
The parents and athletes who spoke to SI say that the system is broken in many ways, but at root are two fundamental problems: First, just figuring out who to file a complaint with is complicated. And, second, it forces those who do come forward to repeatedly badger officials for updates and preys on their patience as reports languish for months, or, in some cases, years. The result, they say, is a structure that does not hold its coaches accountable.
USA Gymnastics declined to address the specifics of the accounts SI documented for this story. But in an emailed statement, CEO Li Li Leung said that progress has been made in reforming how coaches are investigated, writing, “We know that the Safe Sport investigation and resolution process must be faster in the future, and we have made significant changes to our Safe Sport department and processes to make it more efficient. We have, for example, significantly increased department personnel, staffed a chief of athlete wellness position, and invested in better reporting software—all in the last few years. While we are seeing the benefits of these and other changes—including a 69% reduction in active cases in 2020 and a drastically reduced time-to-closure for all Safe Sport cases—we will continue to make improvements until our athletes and our community are more confident in this process.”
But those who spoke to SI remain frustrated. The first systematic hurdle they described encountering: figuring out which organization to report that abuse to. The U.S. Center for SafeSport, which was launched by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee in March 2017, tackles all allegations of sexual abuse within the Olympic movement. Most other claims of mistreatment go to the USA Gymnastics internal SafeSport department. No, they aren’t the same thing—hence the attendant confusion (to complicate matters further, sometimes the USAG SafeSport department may refer a case to the U.S. Center for Safesport to handle). For the purpose of clarity, here they will be referred to as USAG and the Center.
Both USAG and the Center told Tara, who requested that SI use only her first name, that the other organization would handle her daughter’s case. Tara filed her complaint first with USAG on Jan. 14, 2019, detailing the verbal and emotional abuse her child suffered. But a USAG official told Tara to make a report to the Center because it involved Twistars, the Michigan club that made headlines as the gym where Nassar regularly assaulted athletes (even though her daughter’s case was unrelated to the doctor). Tara submitted her daughter’s story once again.
The Center declined jurisdiction, letting her know in an email on Feb. 8, and sent the case back to USAG. But a USAG official wrote in a Feb. 13 email that “due to circumstances, which unfortunately, cannot be shared with you, the USCSS will handle this complaint and any other future complaints regarding John Geddert and Twistars gym.” (Tara’s complaint did not name former Twistars owner John Geddert within the body of the report, only his son, Blaize, wife Kathryn and another coach. John Geddert died by suicide on Feb. 25, the same day he was charged with 24 felonies; neither Blaize nor Kathryn Geddert responded to SI’s request for comment.)
Tara followed up the next day with the Center but never received a response. The day after that, USAG assured her that the Center would be responsible. Then Tara didn’t hear anything from either organization for ... two years.
A Center official reached out to Tara in early March of this year to inform her they had finally opened an investigation into Blaize and Kathryn. Tara was informed earlier this month that the Center wrapped up the case and an investigator had started writing the final report, but no further details were provided.
A spokesperson for the Center said its officials could not discuss the specifics of any cases “to protect the integrity of the process.” He added that while the Center will notify complainants if their case is moved between organizations, it typically does not offer any explanation for why to avoid giving an indication of an investigation’s progress, since it is typically in early stages. But the Center’s CEO, Ju’Riese Colón, explains that the reason most cases get elevated to her organization from USAG is because a conflict of interest exists at the governing body. For instance, if there were claims against a well-known national team coach or a USAG executive or board member, the Center would be likely to handle the case.
Colón added that the Center is working on educational materials to help coaches (and parents and athletes) understand where the line is between tough coaching and abuse. “We’re really doubling down our efforts and resources to create those to help us,” she says. “At the end of the day we would much rather educate folks on what this looks like and how to prevent it than have to investigate allegations of abuse.”
Some might assume Tara’s was an isolated incident. But in several other instances, the initial report landed with USAG before being bumped to the Center for reasons that were never explained. Former gymnasts Samantha Medel and Hoffman, the Stanford grad, each reported their old coaches. The Center quickly took over Medel’s case in August 2019, without explanation to Medel, or the two dozen other gymnasts who had come forward alongside her with accounts about two coaches at their gym.
Hoffman’s complaint against her former club coach was initially declined by the Center last August and went to USAG instead (the coach denied Hoffman’s claims through her lawyer). The governing body assured the former gymnast that it held no conflict of interest in investigating the coach, who had recently been inducted into the USAG Hall of Fame. Four days later, though, USAG changed its tune and sent the case back to the Center. Hoffman last received an update about her case from the Center on July 12: The final report was being written up. As far as Hoffman knows, it has not yet been finalized. (The U.S. Center for SafeSport is also backed up with its caseload.)
For one Texas mom, who requested anonymity, reporting her daughter’s abusive coach presented other logistical complications. When she went to fill out USAG’s reporting form, she found little information about what happened next. Would they need to interview her daughter? Would the investigator be showing up at the gym? USA Gymnastics posts a 10-page document outlining how it conducts investigations and resolves complaints on the SafeSport Policy landing page. The text is difficult to understand and full of legalese. On the introductory page, it states that “the primary goal of USA Gymnastics Safe Sport is safety, not punishment.” It doesn’t outline what complainants can expect as the process unfolds, or that removing coaches from the sport will be difficult.
There were even little things about the form itself that the Texas mom struggled with. For instance, it has space to list only one date for when the incident occurred, but for her daughter (and many others) the abuse was ongoing and not necessarily limited to a single date.
Sara Rowland, the former Chelsea Piers gymnast, says the entire process needs an overhaul. Last spring she shared a Facebook post detailing her experience—and then wondered what came next. Over the course of a month, Rowland researched the SafeSport code and USA Gymnastics’s bylaws and created a Google form to collect experiences of other Chelsea Piers gymnasts who wanted to be involved in filing a complaint. She submitted the report in May 2020 to USA Gymnastics, which included 47 individuals coming forward to testify to abuse by coach Christina McClain. (McClain declined to comment; Chelsea Piers did not respond to SI’s requests.)
Rowland called for better communication for those filing a case, noting how difficult it was to obtain answers.
“There should be a flow chart that tells you how to submit a report and then what’s going to happen [and] what the timeline is,” Rowland says. “They should be thinking of themselves as a project manager and they should be sending out updates once a month. Here’s what’s happening on your case this month. Here’s what you can expect for the next month.”
Rowland had no communication with the USAG between June 2020 and January, when she reached out. The email to her investigator bounced back, and that’s how she found out that person no longer worked at USAG. The organization hadn’t notified her. When Rowland reached out to USA Gymnastics in March, she was informed that the investigator left the governing body and that her case had been assigned to a third person. Her complaint remains ongoing.
For some, knowing a reporting mechanism existed at all presented a challenge. Liz Weathers was unaware that USA Gymnastics had a SafeSport department in 2018 when her daughter left Empire Gymnastics. She says the Texas-based gym did not talk about the SafeSport program and the team handbook provided no resources, either. (The gym did not respond to requests for comment.) Weathers found more information on a gymnastics forum. Coaches and athletes over 18 are required to take SafeSport training courses each year, but parents and minor athletes don’t receive that education.
With all of the confusion surrounding the process, Weathers believes that USAG doesn’t truly want to change. Rather than putting the onus on the clubs whose coaches could potentially be reported, she says, the governing body itself needs to take responsibility for providing both information and training for parents. “USAG has designed a program so they can say they have a program,” says Weathers, who manages an ethics reporting hotline at her company. “They have not designed a program to find their problems and fix them.”
The second issue that parents or athletes run into is how long the process drags out. Rebecca, who has requested not to be identified by her real name, first filed a complaint on behalf of her daughters alleging verbal, emotional and physical abuse against Gymnasiana owner Sabrina Picou in September 2018. (Picou, who sold her gym last year, did not respond to a request for comment.) The complaint has languished with USA Gymnastics for nearly three years. The initial response from the governing body seemed promising, but that hope quickly fizzled. The official handling the probe didn’t contact or respond to any of the parents willing to be involved and, over the next few months, Rebecca was met with silence.
In March 2019, she forwarded her report to Wendy Bruce Martin, who was on the USA Gymnastics SafeSport committee. A different investigator reached out and requested that Rebecca resend any documents or names of witnesses pertaining to the original complaint. Eventually, USAG began reviewing the investigator’s report in early May, and Rebecca waited once again.
After three months and no updates, Rebecca connected with other parents who had already navigated the process. Those parents pointed her to Shelba Waldron, the USA Gymnastics director of safe sport education and training. Frustrated, Rebecca emailed Waldron asking for an update on her case. Waldron responded almost immediately on Aug. 28, 2019, writing that she would get back to Rebecca around “mid-day.” Rebecca didn’t hear from Waldron, or any other USAG official for more than a year. (USAG did not respond to questions about Waldron or make her available for comment.)
Roadblocks in the investigative process pop up in even the most unexpected places, too. Leslie Medows reported her granddaughter’s emotionally abusive coach in March 2020, but ran into another issue: USA Gymnastics would not interview her granddaughter, then 9. Lead investigator Daniel Campbell wrote in an email that “USAG Safe Sport does not interview children under the age of 14. We do, however, allow the parent or guardian to make a statement on their behalf. This statement would be weighted the same as if it came directly from the child.”
Michelle Peterson, who is a consultant and forensic interviewer in Colorado who specializes in child abuse cases, says that USAG’s policy isn’t best practice—that they should be engaging with children with specially trained investigators. “There’s a reason why we have experts who do this and specialize in this, because we’ve learned over the years that kids don’t tell,” she says. “When they do tell, it needs to be someone who’s trained in dealing with trauma and how to ask those questions and get the right information.”
Medows has not been contacted since last September, when her investigator said her case was closed. She does not know how it was resolved.
Rebecca didn’t reach out to USAG again until last September, 13 months after her previous inquiry and two years after the initial complaint; she was told that the case remained open. By that point, the investigation had been delayed so many times that the majority of the parents and athletes involved in the original complaint no longer participated in the sport at all.
While parents and athletes grew increasingly frustrated as their cases languished in the system, USA Gymnastics continued to emphasize that it was becoming an athlete-centric organization. But its actions have told a different story. The delays in the investigative process allow coaches to continue working with children, for the most part with little consequence.
A report being filed cannot guarantee that a coach will be kept away from athletes or even reprimanded. That’s why so many of the coaches reported by the families who spoke to SI are still active. One even coached at recent elite competitions.
That coach was Mary Lee Tracy. When Michelle Beucler saw a tweet with an image of an elated-looking Tracy congratulating one of her athletes at the Winter Cup on Feb. 28, it reminded her of photos she has of her daughter, Alexis.
Michelle recalled watching Alexis interact with Tracy in 2012 during the national championships. Tracy appeared to be encouraging Alexis, then 14, just before her floor routine. When Michelle asked her daughter what her coach told her, she says the teenager responded, “ ‘Mom, she said if I don’t make this routine she’s gonna kick my ass.’ ” Michelle was stunned. But Alexis reminded her that of course her coach looked happy. The cameras were on her. (In an email, Tracy denied this exchange took place.)
It was just part of a pattern of emotionally abusive behavior Michelle and Alexis say Tracy exhibited during Alexis’s six years at Cincinnati Gymnastics Academy. Alexis posted her story on Twitter last August, writing in part, “Mary Lee did not like that I would not show emotion, she would even ask my sister who also trained at CGA in the ACC (fast track) group what she could do in order to break me and make me cry. It got to the point where my teammates would tell me ‘Just cry Poof so she stops yelling and being mean to you. Just cry.’ ”
In an email, Tracy denied any abusive behavior, writing, “Expression is artistry. I wanted to help Alexis open up especially when it came to her gymnastics. … I wanted to do all I could to help her reach her goals.”
After Alexis’s post went viral, Michelle waited one week to see whether USA Gymnastics would contact her or her daughter. After all, the organization tweeted in August that it had opened SafeSport investigations based on information posted to social media. When the first week passed by without any communication, Michelle filed a report. After the second week, she made another. Nearly a month after her daughter’s Twitter post, in September, USAG’s investigator, Nancy Austring, contacted Michelle. Michelle says that she was informed that Austring submitted her report to USA Gymnastics in October, which then turned the case over to the Center. Michelle and Alexis were each interviewed by a Center investigator in May. Neither has seen the results of Austring’s work.
Despite the two investigations, Tracy is still running her gym and training athletes without a single public restriction.
Michelle questions whether anyone at USA Gymnastics would have paid attention to what happened to her daughter had “Twitter not blown up when [Alexis] posted her story.”
Alexis’s post wasn’t the first time Tracy had been involved in controversy. When USAG named Tracy as its new women’s elite developmental coordinator back in 2018, her appointment lasted barely two days. The organization forced Tracy to resign because, according to the governing body, she had inappropriately contacted a Nassar survivor involved in the lawsuits against the organization. She returned to coaching.
Former national team members Alyssa Beckerman and Morgan White have also been vocal in recent years about their experiences with Tracy in the late 1990s and early 2000s, alleging that she overtrained and body-shamed them. Beckerman says that, as far as she knows, USAG has not investigated their concerns or reprimanded Tracy for her behavior.
The abuse that Ashley Davis worked to prevent at Kurt Thomas Gymnastics did not end when she made her complaint, or when she left. Instead the behavior trickled down through other coaches, who targeted another group of young athletes, ones that Davis trained before she left in 2008.
One of those gymnasts was Kaleigh Gallant.
Gallant moved from a smaller program at age 7 to train at the Frisco gym in 2005. She says her coaches didn’t seem to care if she cried or when she struggled with her asthma. Even little things that seemed innocuous at the time now feel to her like part of a disturbing culture of absolute submission. For instance, all of the gymnasts had to wear the same leotard, even at practice. Gallant figured that this was normal for a competitive gym. But the mistreatment, she says, would become more overt in later years. (A representative from Kurt Thomas Gymnastics said that the gym requires uniforms to foster a unified team spirit among its athletes.)
Gallant’s most painful injury occurred in 2011. She landed a double tuck awkwardly with her leg “splayed out” behind her. She says her coaches, Thomas and Josh Cook, insisted that she couldn’t be injured because “the mat was very soft.” She hopped from the floor to the freezer where she scraped frost out to ice her injured knee and ankle. Gallant was eventually diagnosed with a sprained ankle and knee, but, at 13, refused to tell her doctor how much pain she was in. She knew she’d be in even more trouble if she brought in a note barring her from training. Plus, the state meet was coming up. Gallant left the gym and the sport in 2012. (The Kurt Thomas Gymnastics representative denied that Thomas coached Gallant during her time in the gym, but said he could not speak for Cook; Cook did not reply to requests for comment.)
In November 2018, Gallant filed reports with the Frisco police department and USA Gymnastics. The police statement detailed that incident and others over the eight years that Gallant competed for the club. The governing body assigned an investigator, Austring, to the case that December. More than two years of mass-emailed press releases claiming that the organization would put athlete safety first had passed.
Gallant sent Austring the police statement, her medical records and the names of eight teammates who could corroborate her experience. She says Austring passed on her report to USAG in early 2019. Gallant waited, and waited some more, and eventually assumed USA Gymnastics closed or dismissed her case without telling her.
The entire reporting process, says Gallant, now 23, reaffirmed her belief that what had happened to her “wasn’t bad enough” for the governing body to investigate properly or even ask whether she was O.K. It mirrored her experience with her coaches: What she felt or believed was a lie.
“You would never think about the hoops that you would have to jump through to prove to the entity that was supposed to be protecting you that you were hurt,” Gallant says.
As the #GymnastAlliance movement gained momentum last summer, Gallant posted her story anonymously on a smaller Instagram page dedicated to sharing gymnasts’ stories of abuse. Then she made a second post using her name. She saw competitors from other gyms receive overwhelmingly positive support and validation, and, for some, even apologies from their coaches. She expected a similar response. Instead, an attorney representing the gym sent Gallant and her mother each a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Gallant remove her post. (The gym’s representative said the letter was sent because Gallant’s statements were “false and without merit.”)
After sharing her story, Gallant reached out to several USA Gymnastics officials. The organization’s attorney informed her that her case was not actually closed. It had instead been stuck in legal review for nearly 18 months, but no one communicated that to Gallant.
Bottom line: The sport has made abundantly clear that the initiatives in place aren’t helping USA Gymnastics keep its athletes safe, according to the parents and gymnasts who spoke to SI.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Peterson, who in addition to consulting on abuse cases in Colorado is the state’s SafeSport coordinator for USA Hockey, offers a different solution. In hockey, she says, instead of the national governing body’s handling nonsexual abuse complaints, they are handled by state level organizations. For instance, if something happened in Denver, instead of USA Hockey’s handling a claim, the Colorado Amateur Hockey Association would. Peterson says that state-level organizations can investigate these claims more efficiently, avoiding the bottle-necking that occurs with a national organization based far from where the incidents actually occurred.
Each club also has a parent who volunteers to serve as a SafeSport representative and is trained, working in conjunction with state coordinators. Nobody involved in the process has any say over playing time or other team decisions.
When USA Gymnastics suspended Maggie Haney, best known for coaching Olympic gold medalist Laurie Hernandez, in April 2020, it marked the first time the organization handed out a significant, public sanction to a coach accused of emotional and physical misconduct. (An arbitrator later reduced the punishment from eight to five years. Haney sued USAG in federal court in March 2021 in an attempt to overturn it entirely; the case is ongoing.) Of the 217 people on USAG’s permanently ineligible members list, none have been banned for nonsexual abuse.
USA Gymnastics told Rebecca that the organization planned to offer a negotiated resolution to her daughters’ coach, Picou. The mom in Texas received notice that her daughter’s case was administratively closed, citing “insufficient information.” Rowland’s ex-coach remains on an interim suspension. In fact, of the 19 coaches reported, only three—from a single gym—have gotten any final sanction. They can return to coaching unsupervised after completing 50 hours of education classes.
And then there’s Gallant, who waited two and a half years for her case to conclude. According to a letter sent by USAG to Gallant, its investigator did, in fact, corroborate her claims. But because Thomas was dead and other coaches had moved on, and because there had been no recent complaints about the gym and a survey of current parents found that nearly all agreed that it offered a “positive environment” for their children, USAG “administratively closed” the case without issuing any punishments.
Kim Kranz, the USAG chief of athlete wellness, further told Gallant’s lawyer that, because the organization’s SafeSport guidelines weren't enacted until 2016, complaints citing behavior before then would not result in a sanction. Coaches didn’t have guidelines then for what was acceptable and what wasn’t, explained Kranz, whom USAG did not make available for comment. USA Gymnastics was “not in the business of righting past wrongs,” Kranz told Gallant’s lawyer. The organization prioritized making sure current athletes were safe.
What the 16 people who spoke to SI made clear, though, is that until past wrongs are taken seriously, reckoned with and righted, current gymnasts will not be safe.
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Ethiopia has retaken the Olympic gold medal in the men's 10,000 meters.
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Very Olympic Today. You'll catch up on the top stories, smaller events, things you may have missed while you were sleeping and links to the best writing from SI’s reporters on the ground in Tokyo.Twenty-one-year-old Selemon Barega put the men's 10,000-meter Olympic gold medal back in the hands of an Ethiopian man for the first time since the 2008 Olympics. With a 53.92-second last lap, Barega held off world record holder Joshua Cheptegei of Uganda for the 27:43.22 victory.
Cheptegei settled for silver in 27:43.63 with his compatriot Jacob Kiplimo just a quarter of a second behind him for the bronze. It marked Uganda's first Olympic medals on the track since 1996.
Uganda employed team tactics by deploying Stephen Kissa to pace the first few kilometers. At one point, he led the race by almost 50 meters but neither Cheptegei nor Kiplimo went with the defacto pacesetter in Tokyo's hot and humid conditions.
"We were planning for the gold but unfortunately we have a silver and bronze," Kissa said after the race. "But I'm happy. We have two medals."
Barega attempted to close the gap early in the race but settled back in with the chase pack before finally breaking away in the final kilometer. He closed the race in two minutes and 25 seconds for the fastest final 1,000 meters of an Olympic 10,000-meter final.
The last two Olympic gold medals in this event were won by Great Britain's Mo Farah. At 38 years old, he attempted to qualify for this event but failed to hit the time standard to secure his place and missed the Games.
Grant Fisher, a former NCAA champion out of Stanford competing in his first Olympics, was the top American in fifth place, in 27:46.39. Fellow Americans Woody Kincaid and Joe Klecker finished 15th and 16th, in 28:11.01 and 28:14.18, respectively. Fisher and Kincaid will also compete in the first round of the men's 5,000 meters on Tuesday, Aug. 3.
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